Offshore Recruitment Process Outsourcing

I heard Cognet saying about"Recruitment Process Outsourcing"

2008-06-15T22:20:00.000-07:00

Well One more post on Recruitment process outsourcing, i hope this one is with diffrence. Why don't you judge it - Read below the post by cogent.

If you are interested in reducing your cost per hire, time to hire and attracting the best talent available, then Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) is definitely worth considering.

WHAT IS RPO?

“Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) refers to a company outsourcing its recruitment or staffing process to an external service provider”. The external provider shall provide your company with the necessary skills, tools and technologies to perform the recruiting function. Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) will bring in significant COST savings and improvements in the QUALITY of recruitment.

PURPOSE AND BENEFITS

Recruitment Process Outsourcing provides excellent benefits in the areas of Quality, Cost, Service and Speed.

QUALITY: Recruitment is a labor-intensive process and it is further compounded by the fact that it is recurring. To cite an example, your company could have a very high number of open positions during a certain time of the year each requiring varied skill-sets and experience. To hire a team that is capable of sourcing and recruiting these candidates is very challenging. Providers of Recruitment Process Outsourcing have the required processes in place, expertise, an extensive database of resumes and the networking required to source all types of candidates.

COST: Your costs can be significantly reduced because an RPO provider essentially uses “economies of scale”. They are also capable of handling volume fluctuations in a much easier way. For example, the RPO provider could allocate 10 recruiters to your company when volumes are high and then easily shift them to another client when volumes are low. If you as a company were to hire these 10 recruiters, you would either be forced to pay for resources that are not being used or lay them off which involves overhead expenses.

SERVICE: A Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) provider will help to streamline your company’s recruitment function and make it seamless and effective. RPO providers are equipped to provide you with the best people when you need them and also take care of your ongoing and future needs through greater employee retention and process control.

SPEED: “Time to hire” is a very critical factor in the recruitment process as this directly affects business performance. A Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) provider will find it much easier to analyze their database and create a pool of candidates that is ready to be interviewed. They need not take time to advertise for the specific job profile.

Recruitment Process Outsourcing is an end-end function. It begins all the way from designing a job profile to charting the recruitment process and also developing orientation strategies once a candidate is hired. It is not just restricted to hiring a specific person for a specific profile at any time. It is about building a talent pool of resources that can be made accessible for your company. RPO providers also go the extra mile to provide your company with valuable advice and strategies on employee retention.

Recruitment Process Outsourcing has a powerful place in the market. RPO providers are well connected to various companies and the job seeker market. They have a much larger and attractive talent pool than any single company could possibly have.

Sourcing Unlimited

2008-03-11T11:23:00.000-07:00

Can't Find People? Try Name-Generation Firms To Solve Your Sourcing Problems

Any recruiter worth his or her salt knows that there are three essential elements to recruiting: 1) sourcing or finding names, 2) assessment, and 3) selling the candidate. Most corporate recruiters are weakest at the first stage, which is finding the names and contact information of the ideal candidate (the working professional that has the same job title as your open requisition).

Fortunately, there is an easy solution to this

candidate identification problem that, for some reason, 75% of the corporate recruiters and 98% of the managers I have worked with have never heard of. It's puzzling to me that they don't utilize it, because this solution to finding and targeting candidates is quick, relatively inexpensive, and essentially ends the candidate identification problem.

The solution goes by a variety of names including:

Names research
Name identification
Unbundled search

Whatever you call it, name identification research is simply the most underutilized sourcing tool in corporate recruiting.

The reason that name research is so valuable is that most corporate recruiters are weak at sourcing or finding candidates. In contrast, corporate recruiters are pretty good at assessing and selling candidates once they have their name, number, and bio.

It's not surprising that most corporate recruiters stumble when it comes to identifying names because of their high req loads and the fact that they recruit for positions in many different disciplines. It's obviously hard to keep up with "who's working where" when you have limited time and multiple disciplines to cover. Fortunately, employing a names research firm can provide corporate recruiters and managers with all the names they need.

It's A Miracle!

Think of it. You can call a name research firm and tell them that you need the names, phone numbers, email addresses and a brief bio of all the people that hold a key position title at each of your major competitors, and in a couple of days you'll have it. The names provided will all be employed people (the so-called passive candidate) and they will only be from firms that you have expressed an interest in.

Once provided with this information, all the corporate recruiter or manager must now do is to contact them, begin building a relationship and make your sales pitch.

Even though most corporate recruiters have never used name generation, the tool is commonly used by third-party recruiters and executive search firms. They realize that finding names is a unique and specialized talent that, while essential, is a completely different skill from assessing and selling candidates. Many of these third-party recruiters realize that their strength is in building relationships and selling candidates, so they don't hesitate to focus on those important element of recruiting. In fact, many corporate recruiters are surprised when I inform them that it's not uncommon for third-party recruiters in a specialty area to buy the names of the people that they provide as candidates.

Managers frequently think that these third-party recruiters have a huge database of people in a certain profession. While a few do, most, when they are given a recruiting assignment from a client firm, just call their research firm and buy the names. Some large third-party recruiters have their own internal name researchers, but the concept is the same. If you excel at building relationships and convincing candidates, focus on that and let someone else that specializes in finding the names do the sourcing for you.

Costs

I find the cost of unbundled research to be quite reasonable and the quality of services provided to be extremely high. In most cases, if the name is unusable there is no charge.

Incidentally, if you compare the cost of names research and the results it provides to the most common sourcing approach, newspaper ads, there is no comparison. Newspaper ads get you active candidates, people that don't currently possess the job title you are currently recruiting for, a large percentage of unemployed candidates, or candidates from firms that you might care little about. In contrast, names research guarantees you get only what you specify.

The need for expensive executive searches can also be reduced if you don't really need the whole range of services offered by executive search firms. If they are given the names and contact information, many senior managers can make the calls necessary to get these top candidates in for an interview.

Ethics

I know you're probably thinking about the various tricks that these names researchers use to identify these individuals and to get their contact information. My response is, get over it. They don't break laws in order to get the names and that's all you need to know. Incidentally, it's important to realize that you are offering these candidates a better job and opportunity, so you aren't misusing their names in any way.

Identifying Names Research Firms

Kennedy Information (a recruiting publisher) publishes a directory with a complete list of all search firms, and it highlights the ones that do names-only research (also know as unbundled research)...

Conclusion

...The first step in shifting to a model that relies heavily on names research as a primary sourcing tool is admitting upfront that your recruiters don't have the time, interest, or skills to do cold calling and all of the necessary things required to gather names.

It's a common weakness in the corporate world but fortunately, it's not a deadly one. By utilizing names research firms to supplement the names you get from the other most effective sourcing tools (your website, conference recruiting, and referral programs) you can essentially solve your sourcing problem. Then, corporate recruiters and managers can focus on what they do best, which is convincing the identified people to apply, assessing them and selling them on your offer.

The thought of eliminating this tremendous roadblock to recruiting success should make even the most cynical corporate director of recruiting smile. Try it, you'll love it!

Sourcecon 2008 Is On!!

2008-03-11T02:52:00.000-07:00

I am not sure how many of you have hear sourcecon which is short form of sourcingconference and it is a sourcing contest. I tried to be a part of sourcecon 2007 in Challenge 3 and was able to manage to complete the contest after Jeremy.

Let me tel you more about Sourcecon
"
As with many great Secret Societies, the exact genesis of the Organization behind SourceCon is shrouded in mystery.

Much of the story is missing but what has been pieced together is this:

Circa fall 2006 at an un-named eatery (some versions say pub), near a popular industry event, a cross-section of key Professionals from various industries and backgrounds found themselves in heated debate over the events of the day. By the end of the night, and many rounds of good cheer, they realized that they shared a common belief and passion in regards to Sourcing.

The belief was a fundamental changing nature of High Value Talent acquisition creating the need for a comprehensive approach to pure sourcing.

The passion was in finding Innovative ways to master the best practices in the world in the quest to master Talent acquisition.

There are then some sketchy accounts of alien knowledge from Roswell and something to do with a Fibonacci sequence hidden in the art of Da Vinci;

But what we know for sure is a that this Society was created and will be dedicated to the advancement of sourcing as a specialized profession.

The Society believes that the future of Corporate successes will be from those that have master sourcing... and the Society is guardian of this truth."

Any One can take part so every is welcome and see you at the conference.

My Disclosure Policy

2008-03-10T09:56:00.000-07:00

This policy is valid from 10 March 2008

This blog is a collaborative blog written by a group of individuals. For questions about this blog, please contact tihsur at gmail dot com.

This blog accepts forms of cash advertising, sponsorship, paid insertions or other forms of compensation.

The compensation received may influence the advertising content, topics or posts made in this blog. That content, advertising space or post may not always be identified as paid or sponsored content.

The owner(s) of this blog is compensated to provide opinion on products, services, websites and various other topics. Even though the owner(s) of this blog receives compensation for our posts or advertisements, we always give our honest opinions, findings, beliefs, or experiences on those topics or products. The views and opinions expressed on this blog are purely the bloggers' own. Any product claim, statistic, quote or other representation about a product or service should be verified with the manufacturer, provider or party in question.

This blog does not contain any content which might present a conflict of interest.

To get your own policy, go to http://www.disclosurepolicy.org

People Screaming on Recruitment Process Outsourcing

2008-03-10T05:43:00.001-07:00

Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) is a form of business process outsourcing (BPO) where an employer outsources or transfers all or part of its recruitment activities to an external service provider.

HRO Today defines recruitment process outsourcing services to include: sourcing; screening; testing; interviewing; background checks and drug testing; hiring; coordinating the offer letter; on- boarding; maintaining applicant tracking logs, requisition, and candidate files; reporting; and training. Full-service RPO runs the gamut—from finding the candidate to hiring a new employee and almost everything in between.

Outsourced activities range from strategic (workforce planning) to the administrative (generating offer letters) and nearly always involve sourcing candidates. The RPO services firm may hire the displaced recruiters of the company they are now servicing. The services firm may be responsible for all hiring of a certain class of worker, such as non-exempt positions. Contract recruiters may be located at a client site, but often service the client remotely. RPO services firms may help a company re-engineer its recruiting department by standardizing processes; they may write job descriptions; they may facilitate the transition from candidate to new hire.

Recruiting is traditionally industry specific and strategies that work in the manufacturing industry for example may not work well in the life sciences industry and vice versa.

Hence from a Strategic perspective it's always a good idea to find niche based recruiting strategies that yield well for each industry vertical. The recruiting industry is already catching on to this phenomenon and "niche based" job sites are gaining rapid momentum and popularity. However sourcing talent is only a part albeit a very important aspect of the entire recruiting process.

For the purposes of this article we will study what are all the steps within the recruitment process that can and cannot be outsourced to a third party vendor. I will not be getting into the challenges, benchmarking of vendors, quality matrices etc since that is beyond the scope of this article.

Once you’ve decided that recruitment process outsourcing is the right move for your organisation, how do you pick the right agency? Ross Bentley explains the art of choosing and using an RPO partner.

For More Scream ask ME on Tihsur@gmail.com

recruitment process outsourcing, offshore recruitment process outsourcing, http://www.offshorerecruitmentprocess.blogspot.com. rushit shah, recruitment, outsourcing, offshore recruitment, executive search, antal

My company is into

2008-03-10T03:07:00.001-07:00

Antal is the leader in EMEA & Asia Executive Search & Selection with a network of over 50 fully-staffed offices in 24 countries, recruiting talent in a range of industry sectors & skill functions. Since inception in 1993 Antal has placed executives in over 75 countries and offers clients a choice of recruitment & staffing solutions from Retained Executive Search, Search & Selection to Contingent Recruitment in Permanent, Interim & Contract / Temporary staffing.

Antal's executive recruiters combine their recruitment knowledge, search skills, proven headhunting & selection methodologies with knowledge & experience of your industry to deliver a truly value added service. This approach ensures Human Resources Managers, Hiring Managers & Candidates all deal with specialists who know the talent market, the top performers in it and importantly, understand your business. Your Antal Recruiter actively shares information, knowledge & experience across our global network adding extensive cross sector and multi-geographic reach when recruiting with the efficiency of a single contact point.

The Solutions division works with clients on volume recruitment projects deploying Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO), Applicant Tracking, 3rd Party Staffing and Vendor Management solutions.

The Vacancy and Job Search tools allow searching of executive, management & senior jobs in a number of countries, sectors & work functions & free job alert newsletters, resume storage and essential tips in the Candidate Zone.

Antal's global network has physical offices in UK (London HQ + 10 UK offices), Belgium, Bulgaria, China (Beijing, Shanghai & Hong Kong), Croatia, Czech Republic, France, Germany, Hungary, India, Italy (2), Luxembourg, Netherlands, Nigeria, Malta, Poland, Romania (6), Russia (Moscow, St Petersburg, Ekaterinburg), Spain (Madrid & Barcelona), South Africa, Switzerland, Turkey (3), UAE/Dubai.

In each country sector-focussed specialists are aligned to a discipline, enabling us to deliver seamless solutions in Sales, Marketing, HR/Human Resources, Accountancy & Finance, Banking & Law/ Legal, Information Technology, IT Technical, Engineering, Logistics, Operations, Construction, Supply Chain, Consulting, General Management, Healthcare & Public Sector.

Antal has a proven track record of recruiting in the following sectors across EMEA & Asia; Aerospace & Defence, Automotives, Banking, Beverages, Chemicals, Construction, Consumer Goods, Distribution, Electronics, Energy, Engineering, FMCG Food, Financial Services, Retail, Electronics, Healthcare, Information Technology, FMCG-Non Food, Insurance, Leisure, Legal, Manufacturing, Media & Advertising, Pharmaceutical, Biotechnology, Professional Services, Accountancy, Public Sector, Real Estate, Technology, Telecommunications, Transport, Utilities & Mining/ Resources..........

ask me for more informaiton on RSHAH AT ANTAL dot COM

recruitment process outsourcing, executive search, antal international, antal, rushit shah, linkedin, offshore recruitment , outsourcing, india

Search Engines vs. Meta-Search Tools - Article From my Other Blog

2008-03-06T21:02:00.001-08:00

Search Engines

Search engines and meta-search tools are the principal vehicles for finding documents on the web. Because there are many misconceptions about how these tools actually operate, it’s important for recruiters to understand their real structure, capabilities and limitations.

Search engines find web pages by matching keywords or phrases found in the documents. But it’s important to note that users are not searching through a live interface to the web. Search engines build a proprietary database of text snippets retrieved from web pages by automated software programs called spiders. Spiders are configured to follow links and gather information from specific areas on a web page. The search engine then builds a database (or index) of the results. When a user searches a search engine, they are actually searching text snippets saved to the index, not the web itself.

With billions of the pages already on the web and some estimates claiming that over 7 million pages of the content are added every day, it is extremely unlikely that any single search engines will ever index the entire web. It is also important to know that no two search engines index contains millions of unique pages. Therefore, to access the universe of documents, across even 50% of the web, recruiters need to use multiple search engines.

Meta-Search engines

Meta-Search engines are tools that search multiple search engines all at once. This sounds like great solutions for recruiters, but there are some complicating issues.

First, because each search engine uses slightly differently syntax, meta-search tools have a hard time keeping up. Second, because only a small subset of search engines support advances search featured like field search commands, most meta-tools do not map search strings with those commands. That means some meta-tools are not particularly useful for all the types of advanced search we’ll learn in our search lab, although they are getting better at supporting more advanced searches every day. Additionally, we would strongly recommend that you experiment with these meta-search tools occasionally.

A few top meta-search tools are:

The SearchLab Portal contains additional online and offline meta-search tools. Now that we understand these terms, it’s time to understand how to work with search engines. Next, we’ll learn to use Boolean logic and field search commands to construct complex search strings.

My Words on Professional Networking

Searching tips for Job Boards and Search Engines

"P.E.R.F.E.C.T. T.E.N." Resolutions

Useful Abbreviations

Antal International - Recruitment process Outsourcing

2008-03-06T09:51:00.000-08:00

My New Job at ANTAL INTERNATIONAL NETWORk

2008-02-29T09:21:00.000-08:00

I happy to announce you my New Job. Which is at Antal International Network as Executive search Consultant.

Antal International Executive Search & Interim

Antal is the leader in EMEA & Asia Executive Search & Selection with a network of over 50 fully-staffed offices in 24 countries, recruiting talent in a range of industry sectors & skill functions. Since inception in 1993 Antal has placed executives in over 75 countries and offers clients a choice of recruitment & staffing solutions. Retained Executive Search, Search & Selection in Permanent & Interim

In this position I was responsible for projects concerning Antal's clients recruitment needs on Middle and Senior Management profiles. I did the head hunting activity, sourcing and selection activity as well as job and profile definition together with the client. Mainly into Executive Search

Rushit Shah’s Specialties:

executive Search, executive search consultant, cxo, recruiters, recruitment, recruitment process outsourcing, offshore recruitment process outsourcing, orpo, rpo, business development, outsourcing, offshore recruitment, executive researcher, Passive executive search, Executive Head Hunting, Cold calling, Executive Search, Executive Search, Executive Recruitment, Research, Consulting, Project Management. Operating in India and other global markets.

Executive Search and Global Business Development consultant @ Antal International Executive Search / oRPO Specialist

India

Current

Executive Search and Global Business Development consultant at Antal International Executive Search

Past

Co-Founder And Web Master at Offshore Recruitment Process Outsourcing Association
Marketing Manager at Outsource 2 India
E-Eecruitment Specialist at Os2i PVT LTD

4 more...

Education

University of Pune

Recommended

1 person has recommended Rushit Shah

Connections

500+ connections

Industry

Staffing and Recruiting

Websites

Rushit Shah tihsur@gmail.com’s Summary

Rushit Shah tihsur@gmail.com’s Specialties:

Rushit Shah tihsur@gmail.com’s Experience

Executive Search and Global Business Development consultant

Antal International Executive Search

(Privately Held; 501-1000 employees; Staffing and Recruiting industry)

February 2008 — Present (1 month)

• Executive Recruitment, Selection, Consulting, Executive career management and Management consulting globally
- Business Development (researching the top producers within a particular industry, market research and analysis, first contacts with potential clients, client care activities)
- Recruitment projects (project planning, job market research and analysis, search and selection of potential candidates for conducted projects, carrying on interviews and phone interviews)
- Creation of a synergistic match between a company and a prospective employee
- Executive Recruitment, Selection, Consulting, Executive career management and Management consulting globally
- Business Development (researching the top producers within a particular industry, market research and analysis, first contacts with potential clients, client care activities)
- Recruitment projects
- Executive Search

Turn your staff into recruiters

2008-01-29T11:19:00.000-08:00

Employees who refer a friend or contact to the law firm Baker & McKenzie can do rather nicely out of it if the company ends up employing that person.

“Our referral scheme gives people who recommend technical [legal] staff £5,000 and support staff, £2,000,” explains Martin Blackburn, the firm’s UK director of human resources. The scheme generates about 5 per cent of new recruits and, in spite of the sums paid, is very cost effective compared with other methods of recruitment.

Employee referral schemes are a popular way for organisations to recruit new blood. Not only are they cheap compared with traditional recruitment methods, but they have other advantages, such as an extra level of personal endorsement that traditional recruitment seldom provides.

Companies report that those who join this way are likely to be better, more loyal performers. And, unlike many who respond to an classified advertisement, referred candidates are likely to be well informed about the company.

At the top end of the market, those who introduce successful candidates can receive as much as £5,000, but sums elsewhere are not to be sniffed at. First Direct, the UK bank, pays staff who recommend friends £500 – £250 when the recruit joins and £250 if he or she is still there in six months.

“It is very successful,” says the company. Thirty-six per cent of all our new recruits come through the scheme.” Their performance is also higher “because they know people who work here, they know what it’s going to be like and they tend to make their contribution quicker”.

Leigh Lafever-Ayer, an HR manager at Enterprise Rent-A-Car, agrees: “Our employees know their jobs and what it takes. They won’t recommend people who aren’t up to it, so those they do recommend tend to stay longer.” What’s more, she explains, when new recruits join “they have an in-built mentoring system in the person who recommended them.” Enterprise, she says, pays people who recommend new employees upwards of £500.

Even recruitment agencies, which stand to lose from the application of such schemes, see the benefits for their own operations. Rob Scott, managing director of Aaron Wallis, offers candidates who refer others “day-out” incentives ranging from flights over London to bungee jumps.

“The scheme is in its early stages but represents great value for us – the incentives cost a few hundred pounds and the payback is usually 10 to 15 times that,” he says.

The practice of employee referrals appears to be more common in the US than in Europe. At Ernst & Young in the UK, 18 per cent of new employees are referrals; in the US, the figure is 50 per cent. The accountancy firm says the reason is that, like many US organisations, it relies heavily on its alumni association for recruitment. In the UK, by contrast, the first port of call is often a recruitment agency or graduate scheme.

But Angela Baron, an adviser at the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, raises questions about relying on referral schemes long term. “The downside can be [a lack of] diversity,” she says.

“If referral schemes are your major source of recruits, you need to remember that people tend to socialise with people like themselves. You have to recognise this – especially as more and more organisations are trying to reflect their customer base or the public.” Referral schemes are therefore best used as part of a balanced approach to recruitment, she says.

Ms Baron is also concerned about offering large cash incentives: “In an ideal world, you’d be such a good employer that your staff would recommend you anyway.”

Mr Scott urges companies to incorporate an audit trail into the referral schemes to combat fraud. In one case, a hospital in Atlanta sacked four people when it discovered that its scheme had been scammed to the tune of $35,000. Because of the need for transparency, says Mr Blackburn, human resources staff are not allowed to participate in Baker & McKenzie’s scheme.

Still, he thinks referral schemes are valuable and offer scope for innovation. “One idea I’m interested in is flexing the reward based on the part of the business that you need to recruit into. So if you’re very short on secretaries, you pay a double bonus. Doing this kind of thing also keeps the scheme at the forefront of employees’ minds.”

Human risk management: Are you in the know?

2008-01-29T11:17:00.000-08:00

Organisations spend a fortune protecting themselves against external threats: thousands of security guards supervise doorways, sophisticated systems monitor electronic transactions, and CCTV surveillance cameras watch our every move.

But are we unwittingly inviting ID thieves, unqualified professionals, and the dishonest to infiltrate our organisations, by giving them security badges, access to sensitive data, unrestricted entry to buildings, and work with vulnerable staff and customers?

Risk and threat management

The old-fashioned, hierarchical view that senior executives expose more threats than junior employees ignores the example of the office cleaner who might have easier access to sensitive areas than a director.

HR needs to assess its threat exposure from individual or families of roles, and compare these to the organisation's risk strategy. That way it can mitigate risks appropriately, focus its investigatory effort, and avoid over-emphasising unwarranted checks.

Deciding on the 'right' levels of checks depends on your organisation's sensitivity to risk, which is partly governed by individual corporate values, industry, environment and regulation.

Many risk and security managers are busy defining increasingly defensive and selective employment policies to shield their organisations. But they then delegate pre-employment screening to HR departments, already struggling in the face of tight resourcing budgets, demanding timescales, or the highest vacancy levels on record (source: ONS).

Strategic human risk management

How should HR handle this tricky conflict: finding skilled people quickly and cost effectively on one hand; and safe, compliant recruitment, threat management and protection on the other?

For HR to truly reflect its organisation’s risk strategy, it needs to ring fence pre-employment screening from its other recruitment activities. HR faces pressure to deploy the right staff quickly and cost effectively, but it usually lacks the objectivity, resources, and know-how of a discrete, focused, specialist background checking team. Their organisations needlessly suffer staff-perpetrated theft - and worse - at the hands of repeat offenders.

The 'right' checks

Simple checks to mitigate threats

Find out who you're dealing with using a reputable ID verification database.

Find out if they're entitled to work in the employment zone and role.

Find out if the salary you’re paying can sustain any insurmountable debt.

Attracting a manager or professional candidate costs an average of £5,000 (source: CIPD), and £2,000 for high volume, customer service roles, yet checking who you’re dealing with rarely amounts to more than 2 per cent of this. So what's putting us off?

Perhaps it's because it's such an effort to elicit a worthwhile work reference that employers simply give up altogether, or rely on recommendations from unsubstantiated referees.

And, even though a sixth of the workforce has a criminal record, our voracious appetite to find undisclosed convictions, whether or not these checks are relevant or even lawful, can add several weeks' delay.

The prevalence of verification databases, which many businesses are already using to confirm customers' ID and credit worthiness, means you can more reliably check employees' identifications, their financial probity and address histories.

Indeed, there is little point using any other selection criteria unless you know who you are dealing with. Dishonest employees are more tempted to steal when their debt repayments far exceed their salaries. Credit reference agencies can suggest how applicants are coping with loans, highlight outstanding County Court Judgements (CCJs) and verify address histories on request.

Any skilled resourcing specialist knows that they can more reliably predict a candidate's future behaviour by reviewing their most recent conduct. Referees' increasing reticence to volunteer anything more than the standard tenure dates and job titles shouldn't deter vigilant hiring managers. Up to two-thirds of British workers would lie on their application forms to get a job (source: Monster).

Don't underestimate the value of authentic work histories; and verify the employment experiences that candidates brag about during interviews and on application forms.

Reference checking tips

Ring fence referencing from other resourcing activities.

Check the genuine existence of former employers.

Check the validity of named referees.

Check tenure dates, job titles, and reasons for leaving.

Check your candidate's record of dismissible, crime related conduct on a dishonesty register.

Work references

We all know from experience that busy previous employers might only yield references half the time. "We're able to elicit references for well over 90 per cent of candidates because we have dedicated specialists who can focus all their efforts on chasing referees, with all the right authorisations immediately to hand," says Nick Palmer, one of Reed Screening's team leaders. "Our main obstacle is simply when the former employer has closed down."

Clearly, this outsourced provider doesn't suffer from the same distractions faced by in-house resourcing teams.

My top tip on obtaining work references is to not rely on referee contact information supplied by candidates. Application forms typically ask candidates to include names and telephone numbers of former employers.

But dishonest candidates regularly put forward a loyal friend, family member, or even themselves to provide a glowing reference. Instead, use a reputable company register to check that the organisation exists, and an equally reliable directory to independently find a valid contact.

Then, as a minimum, corroborate start and leaving dates, job titles and, if you can, reasons for leaving. And even if their previous job ended in dismissal, your otherwise ideal applicant could divulge a reasonable explanation.

If you believe that lies on CVs indicate a propensity to dishonesty, you will need to pinpoint fictitious employment histories, and fabricated qualifications which, by themselves, may disqualify candidates for specific roles. In some regulated, financial services roles, a firm could threaten its ability to trade by employing an unqualified professional.

More advanced checks include searches on director databases, and media searches which, as well as highlighting adverse news reports about candidates, also expose journalist infiltrators who may have written damaging articles in the past.

In addition, information about employees' previous, dismissible, crime related conduct is becoming more readily available on 'dishonesty registers'. Many large employers can qualify to become members of these registers if they satisfy data protection legislation, adequate employment practices, and contribute their own dismissal data.

A final word

The worst mistake organisations make is to believe that they've protected themselves by including the words "subject to satisfactory checks" on job offers when, in reality, they use unreliable sources or simply don't undertake the right checks.

There's now abundant advice, data and services to help. So take advantage and align your recruitment processes with your organisation's risk strategy.

Firing An Employee

2008-01-29T11:12:00.000-08:00

Being in the IT Enabled industry with highest attrition levels, firing an employee would be like a pinch of salt on an open wound. But sometimes, a small pinch of salt is required on the wound to stop it from getting further infected.

According to statistics compiled by the National Human Resource Development Network, attrition rates in IT-enabled business process outsourcing sector have come down from 30-33 per cent being witnessed off late to about 25 per cent now. Despite this being a much discussed issue, firing is essential because retention of non performers affects group morale. Poor employees reduce team performance by wasting time and efforts of other workers.

Often managers have to have this most hated and highly uncomfortable confrontation with an employee; firing. The response that the manager will get is quite unpredictable, as some may agree with on the failures and some may want to go on an extended argument, sometimes getting a little "physical".

The manager has to be fully prepared before firing someone as to how he handles this demanding confrontation can decide how the rest of the employees look upon the manager and the company as a whole.

When To Fire An Employee?

Though most of the time the manager is aware of the guidelines formulated by the company on firing, it can still be quite subjective. Generally, any employee who is not contributing to the overall goals of the company should be asked to leave. However, not before the following points are considered.

a) When the employee is not contributing towards the overall goal of the company, he needs to be made aware of this fact and helped to work in the right direction.

b) If the employee is still not able to bring his performance up to the acceptable levels, a thorough investigation should be made to assess if he needs any training. Investigation can be made through discussions, meetings, feedback from the immediate supervisor, client's feedback etc.

c) After providing the training, if the employee is still not able to come up to the acceptable levels, the manager has to go through a "Progressive Discipline Process".

d) The purpose of this progressive discipline process is to ensure that low performance is not because of a factor controlled by the company. These could be like the hiring process, the training process, evaluation methods being followed or man management issues in the team.

e) The Employee Relations Manager has to be in the loop as that ensures both the Manager and the employee get a fair deal.

How To Fire An Employee?

While firing has to be a last resort measure, many times fearing the repercussions, many managers delay firing, resulting in "baggage" in the team.

If the reason to fire an employee is not because of his activities as mentioned and agreed upon in the employee hand book but is solely because of underperformance, by carefully working with the employee, many performance shortcomings can be resolved.

If all help and support does not work, the manager must give strong verbal warning that specifies expected work quality or attitude improvement and cites specific suggestions for effecting such an improvement. If the employee shows no improvement, issue a written warning. Most of the time employees just need to be "shaken up" to improve their performance and a written warning does this magic, most often than not.

After a written notice, if the employee does not show any improvement, involve the Human Resource and Employee Relations and let the employee know that he is a round peg in a square hole. By following the above procedure, the manager has all papers in place to justify firing.

Firing and Attrition

Firing and Attrition are very much related to each other, though distantly. In both these cases, the manager looses trained manpower.

When Jack Welsh, ex-CEO of GE instituted his policy of yearly appraisals-generously rewarding the top 20% 'A' performers, developing the middle 70% 'Bs', and firing the bottom 10% 'Cs', he certainly did not have the IT Enabled operation in mind. Forget firing the bottom 10%, in the current situation, companies would talk about re-training the bottom 10% in an endeavor to curb the high attrition rates.

Sometimes, firing can look like attrition. In a recent news update, India's largest software service company, lost about 1000 employees at the end of first quarter of 2005. According to sources, this is the result of a carefully planned salary model called the Economic Value-added model that came into existence two years ago. This two year cycle model which involves assessment, retraining and exit discussions saw the major percentage those quitting as non-performers. They were given low ranking for the second year in a row for not showing any sign of improvement despite undergoing mentorship programme.

Looking at firing and attrition together in a different light, firing can be an excellent tool to contain attrition.

Attrition can simply be defined as employee leaving his current job due to reasons like, job pressure, health problems, personal reasons, inefficient boss, lack of job security etc. All the above reasons are interlinked and can be the reasons for good workers to quit.

If the team has under-performers who despite given sufficient support and training is unable to perform, but they continue to be part of the team damage the morale of the team. A performer will not want to be part of the team which has non-performers because he will have to compensate for the non performer, thereby increasing his job output/pressure. A continuous job pressure results in health problems. Having frequent health problems not only reduces his performance, but also affects him financially. At this juncture, the performer realizes that he is working with an inefficient manager who is not capable of "cleaning up" the team by firing non-performers. With the above, the performer employee feels insecure and resigns.

CareerBuilder.com Launches Personified, A Talent Management Consulting Firm

2008-01-27T07:08:00.000-08:00

CareerBuilder.com the nation's largest online job site with more than 23 million unique visitors and over 1.6 million jobs, has launched Personified, a consulting firm that helps employers understand and leverage the relationship between talent management and company performance. Some of the talent solutions the company will provide include: employee acquisition and retention; recruitment process outsourcing; employment branding; inclusive culture development; and employee engagement.

The goal of Personified is to develop customized talent solutions that allow employers to get the best return on their investment in people, processes and technology. The company differentiates itself through its deep understanding of the online environment and access to a vast talent pool and in-depth employment data.

Personified evolved from CareerBuilder.com's Human Capital Consulting Division, which successfully launched in 2006, and will allow the CareerBuilder.com network access to a greater share of the $18.4 billion global human resources consulting industry(i).

"Personified will operate independently, but will leverage the knowledge and resources of CareerBuilder.com to deliver unmatched insight into the behavior of job seekers and employees," said Matt Ferguson, CEO of CareerBuilder.com. "The new company was formed to address increased demands from the market for more robust talent management solutions."

Personified is being launched in the wake of a tightening labor market driven in large part by the impending retirement of many Baby Boomers and the lack of skilled talent to fill the knowledge gap. According to CareerBuilder.com's annual job forecast(ii), 41 percent of employers say they have positions for which they can't find qualified talent.

"Personified helps employers navigate a new era of talent management, where employees and job seekers are empowered by the Internet and can find a new career opportunity or get insight on a company at a moment's notice," said Mary Delaney, President of Personified. "The average tenure of an employee continues to decline -- making the talent marketplace extremely competitive and employers' ability to retain intellectual capital much more challenging. In fact, a quarter of employees plan to leave their current position in the next two years(iii)."

Despite the hiring environment becoming more competitive every day, nearly half (48 percent) of employers surveyed by CareerBuilder.com reported that they don't have a recruitment strategy in place(iv). Personified will be focused on four key areas of recruitment and retention to help employers propel their businesses forward:

    1.  Talent Acquisition
       More than a quarter (27 percent) of employers surveyed by
       CareerBuilder.com say, due to a tight job market, they have retained
       workers whom they otherwise wouldn't due to performance issues or a
       slowdown in work(v).  Personified helps employers optimize their
       recruitment process and more effectively staff their business through
       recruitment process outsourcing and analysis of a company's current
       recruitment processes from the perspective of the candidate, recruiter
       and hiring manager.

   2.  Employment Branding
       Seventy-eight percent of employers surveyed say their companies do not
       have an employee brand(vi).  Personified works with companies to build
       and communicate an employment brand that sets them apart from
       competitors and establishes a company as a desirable place to work --
       which ultimately leads to higher quality talent, reduced recruitment
       costs and improved employee retention.

   3.  Workforce Culture -- Diversity/Inclusion
       Forty-six percent of workers do not believe their workplace mirrors
       national demographics(vii).  More employers are recognizing the
       positive impact a diverse workforce has on the bottom line.
       Personified helps employers identify and build the right culture
       within their organizations to create an inclusive environment that
       better mirrors their customer base, embraces diverse viewpoints and
       boosts innovation.

   4.  Employee Engagement -- Training
       When job seekers were asked to identify the defining moment when they
       started looking for a new employer, the top reason cited was the
       feeling that there was nothing left to learn or no challenge or growth
       potential(viii).  After identifying what initially attracts candidates
       to their opportunities and whether the corporate environment delivers
       on its promise, Personified builds training programs in recruitment,
       leadership, sales, diversity, and project management.


   For more information about Personified, visit: http://www.personified.com

About CareerBuilder.com

CareerBuilder.com is the nation's largest online job site with more than 23 million unique visitors and over 1.6 million jobs. Owned by Gannett Co., Inc. , Tribune Company , The McClatchy Company and Microsoft Corp. , the company offers a vast online and print network to help job seekers connect with employers. CareerBuilder.com powers the career centers for more than 1,200 partners, including 140 newspapers and leading portals such as America Online and MSN. More than 300,000 employers take advantage of CareerBuilder.com's easy job postings, 26 million-plus resumes, Diversity Channel and more. CareerBuilder.com and its subsidiaries operate in the U.S., Europe, Canada and Asia. For more information, visit http://www.careerbuilder.com.

    (i)    Kennedy Information: HR Consulting Marketplace 2006-2010
   (ii)   CareerBuilder.com "2008 Job Forecast" conducted by Harris
          Interactive December 2007
   (iii)  CareerBuilder.com "2008 Job Forecast" conducted by Harris
          Interactive December 2007
   (iv)   CareerBuilder.com Q2 2007 Employment Forecast
   (v)    CareerBuilder.com Q4 2007 Employment Forecast
   (vi)   CareerBuilder.com Q2 2007 Employment Forecast
   (vii)  CareerBuilder.com and Kelly Services Discrimination Study conducted
          by Harris Interactive June 2007
   (viii) CareerBuilder.com "2008 Job Forecast" conducted by Harris
          Interactive December 2007

United Airlines Renews Contract with Spherion's Recruitment Process Outsourcing Division

2008-01-24T00:31:00.000-08:00

  Proven Track Record of Service Excellence and Overall Performance in RPO
               Delivery Lead to Extended Client Engagement

   FT. LAUDERDALE, Fla., Jan. 23 /PRNewswire/ -- Spherion Corporation's
recruitment process outsourcing (RPO) division today announced that United
Airlines has renewed its contract with the Company through 2010. The scope
of work calls for Spherion to support more than 4,000 of the airline's
annual hires, including flight attendants, ground crew, customer service
and reservation agents. Serving as a talent acquisition partner for United
Airlines since 2005, Spherion helps the airline identify the most qualified
candidates across a variety of skill categories.

   Spherion leads the full cycle recruitment process for select positions
within United Airlines, which includes proactive sourcing, screening, and
assessment of candidates.

   "Spherion has proven its RPO division can deliver results and serve as
a trusted, long-term partner for our recruitment needs," said Sheila
Schroeder, Managing Director of Staffing at United Airlines.

   The engagement is led by more than 20 experienced Spherion recruitment
professionals across the United States. Servicing United Airlines in over
100 locations, Spherion's recruiters have partnered with the airline to
deliver a sourcing strategy customized to United Airlines' unique hiring
needs.

   "Spherion's RPO division is comprised of a dedicated and trusted team
of seasoned recruiters that work closely with our clients to implement a
hiring strategy that will deliver long-term success," said Roy Krause,
president and chief executive officer of Spherion. "We look forward to a
continued partnership with United Airlines and remain deeply committed to
finding the best talent for the company."

   To learn more about Spherion's RPO services, visit http://www.spherionrpo.com.

   About Spherion

   Spherion Corporation is a leading recruiting and staffing company that
provides integrated solutions to meet the evolving needs of companies and
job candidates. As an industry pioneer for more than 60 years, Spherion has
sourced, screened and placed millions of individuals in temporary, temp-to-
hire and full-time jobs. Positions range from administrative and light
industrial to a host of professions that include accounting/finance,
information technology, engineering, manufacturing, legal, human resources
and sales/marketing.

   With approximately 700 locations in the United States and Canada,
Spherion delivers innovative workforce solutions that improve business
performance. Spherion provides its services to more than 8,000 customers,
from Fortune 500 companies to a wide range of small and mid-size
organizations. Employing more than 300,000 people annually through its
network, Spherion is one of North America's largest employers. To learn
more, visit http://www.spherion.com.

SOURCE Spherion Corporation

ORPO - Let them do the jobhunting for you

2008-01-03T08:30:00.000-08:00

You may not recognise the name Aliaxis, but you'll probably recognise its constituent parts - in the UK it comprises eight companies: Alutec, Durapipe UK, Greenwood Air Management, GPS PE Pipe Systems, Hunter Plastics, Marley Plumbing and Drainage, GPS PE Pipe Fittings and Philmac. These businesses, all well-known brands in their fields, employ 1,500 people. Worldwide, Aliaxis operates in 39 countries, employing 12,000 people in total.

If your company is of a certain size, you'll understand some of Aliaxis's problems: the HR teams faced a number of ongoing issues. The eight different Aliaxis businesses, supported by four different HR departments, all operated as independent business units. Each business had different methods and approaches to recruitment - yet they had common problems, as well as areas of best practice that were not shared.

Two particular issues stood out. First, all businesses seemed to have difficulty in recruiting and attracting candidates. This was compounded by the fact that candidates who were offered jobs often turned the roles down. Second, no process was in place to capture data about candidates.

Claire Silvester, head of HR in the UK, backed by Aliaxis's HQ in Paris, took this as an opportunity to centralise the recruitment process. ResourceBank was identified following a thorough research programme. Aliaxis had worked with ResourceBank on senior appointments in the past and was impressed with the service. Aware that ResourceBank specialises in setting up outsourced resourcing centres, Silvester spoke to two ResourceBank clients, Adams and Kimberly-Clark, to learn about their experiences.

She says: "The outsourced approach had a lot of appeal in terms of standardising processes across all businesses and attracting a higher calibre of candidates. Finding the right partner was critical to the success. We are not a massive organisation in the UK, so I didn't want to work with any of the very large outsourced recruitment specialists where we may not get such high levels of service.

"ResourceBank really impressed us with its willingness to tailor a solution to suit our needs. However, we wanted to proceed with caution. We appointed ResourceBank to run a three-month trial for us across all of our businesses."

The trial

During the trial, ResourceBank was tasked with recruiting 25 people, ranging from a finance manager and production planner, to a marketing manager and area sales manager. The roles were based across the UK.

The team advertised the vacancies in a wide range of media, predominantly online. They handled 1,516 applications, selecting 354 candidates to complete a full competency-based interview, then selected 80 candidates for interview, providing Aliaxis with a choice of the best three candidates for each role.

ResourceBank was invited to present the results to the managing directors and HR teams across all the businesses. The results were convincing. There was an increase in the number of people who attended interviews and all candidates who were offered jobs accepted.

According to Silvester: "The trial period gave our individual businesses the opportunity to buy into the new approach. It clearly demonstrated that a centralised system was more effective. Even people in the team who were previously reluctant to give up long-term relationships with existing recruitment suppliers could understand why this new approach would give us a competitive edge."

As a result of the successful trial, in April 2007, the Aliaxis Resourcing Centre (ARC) was launched. Aliaxis signed a two-year contract with ResourceBank. The ARC, staffed by five dedicated ResourceBank employees, was set up in just three months. Its brief was to recruit 120 candidates a year, primarily for profesional, clerical, and administrative roles.

The ARC's role includes everything: taking the initial brief, creating job briefs, placing recruitment ads, interviewing candidates, shortlisting candidates for the Aliaxis recruiters to interview, providing feedback to candidates, issuing rejection and offer letters, as well as checking references.

The results

Silvester says: "A centralised approach gave us the opportunity to recruit under the Aliaxis brand name for the first time as opposed to using the individual company names. Candidates are attracted to working for a larger global organisation, with a wider range of career prospects, and this helped to attract a higher calibre of candidates.

"Previously recruitment was haphazard across the organisation. We had set up excellent in-house training and development schemes - yet these were of limited value if we couldn't recruit the right people into the business. Since partnering with ResourceBank, we have thorough processes and systems in place, which enable us to be far more efficient and allow us to recruit more effectively.

"All candidates, whether they are offered roles or not, are communicated with in a professional manner and on a timely basis. This means that they have a positive experience of Aliaxis as a business, are more likely to accept the job if offered, and are keen to find out about other roles within the group if they are not successful. The ARC team also interviews our internal candidates for promotions, benchmarking them against external candidates. If internal candidates are successful, they really feel they have earned their promotion."

The ARC logs all candidate details into a bespoke database. By building an exclusive Aliaxis candidate bank, ResourceBank has created an invaluable tool for speeding up the recruitment process. For example, a candidate who applied for a sales manager role for Marley Plumbing was not right for the job but was ideally suited for a role at Greenwood Air Management.

"In the past eight to 10 weeks, we have offered four jobs to people who were known to us through the database. These appointments have been made in less than a week. As the database grows, we will continue to see even more successes," says Silvester.

"As an added bonus, we are also saving £90,000 per year. We are really driving the company forward with this new approach to recruitment."

Contact Information

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Thank You

Rushit Shah

Wipro Killing India

2008-01-03T08:17:00.000-08:00

Wipro opens outsourcing centre in Philippines -- WHY???

The new center in Cebu would hire more than 900 employees and would focus on customer service support, technical support, human resource and financial and accounting services

Reuters

Mumbai: Wipro Ltd has opened a business process outsourcing facility in the Philippines as it expands overseas to cut costs.

The new centre in Cebu would hire more than 900 employees and would focus on customer service support, technical support, human resource and financial and accounting services.

Its IT services division, Wipro Technologies, is also looking at starting centres in other fast-growing cities in the Philippines, the company said in a statement.

“The Philippines is one of the largest English speaking nations with a strong IT orientation and a talent pool of 29 million,” T.K. Kurien, president of Wipro’s BPO unit said.

Indian outsourcing companies are expanding operations in China, the Philippines, Vietnam and Kenya in a bid to stay competitive as higher wages, expensive property prices and a rising rupee eat into profits.

Last year, Wipro started delivery centres in Romania and Shanghai.

BCS believes = Offshore outsourcing 'big' for 2008

2008-01-03T08:09:00.000-08:00

Cost saving and mobile employee bases are two main reasons why experts predict outsourcing will rise in 2008.

Vice president of strategic outsourcing programmes at Unisys, Joe Hogan, said that the drive for new technologies such Apple's iPhone, combined with the need to reduce costs will likely see a boom of outsourcing from countries around the world.

"Next-generation devices, which have a tremendous capacity to revolutionise productivity, should go to employees whose jobs touch customers every day, and who require real-time information to capture those customers and keep them happy," he explained.

According to Information Week's Mary Hayes Weier, countries in like India will see great benefits as outsourcing contracts will employ many workers and raise the salaries of their IT professionals.

"Service providers in India [are] going as far as to retain science graduates to become technologists and scouring the rural regions of India for talent," Ms Weier said.

According to her however, more offshore work in the future will go to Latin America, China, Eastern Europe than India as its IT pool diminishes.

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I thought you guys might be interested to read this article i found. I have different thoughts then what BCS have. I think India is going to have hard time in 2008 being decreasing Dollar rates and .....(cant tell you).comment me to know more

Reduce Your Tax Liability with Outsourcing - thanks to Mark

2007-12-23T11:41:00.000-08:00

Thanks to Mark for the awesome post.

The business practice known as “outsourcing” was coined in the 1980s. Outsourcing is a process involving the commission or transfer of a business process to an outside organisation capable of fulfilling that function. Many types of business functions can and are being outsourced, such as accounting, customer support, human resources, information technology, real estate management, and customer support.

What is Outsourcing?

Outsourcing is an organisational decision usually requiring top-tier management approval. The decision to divest is not a light one, as it involves the transfer of assets and people, which – depending on the laws of the country in which the outsourcing company is resident – can be assessed capital gains tax.

There are various reasons why companies outsource. Some want their organisational effort to be focused on their so-called ‘core competencies’, and thus distribute ancillary tasks to an outsourcing entity. Others are in a fiscal situation that requires them to transfer people and assets to offshore locations in order to avoid or minimise taxes that would be otherwise imposed on them.

Outsourcing is not exactly the same as off-shoring, however interchangeably the terms might be used. When one outsources, he or she enters into a contract with a supplier or service provider, while off-shoring simply means the transfer of a function – which may or may not remain within the parent organisation – to an overseas location. It is also different from subcontracting in that the supplier is not involved in a specific project only, but in the ongoing activities of the contracting firm.

Tax Benefits of Outsourcing

Businesses want to streamline their budget and reduce their tax liabilities. By outsourcing certain tasks, they can operate under the aegis of the supplier and have minimal exposure in the supplier’s resident country. This means that they will also have a minimal amount of the legal responsibility that accompanies such functions as the recruitment and termination of workers, property purchases, accounting functions such as payroll, and sometimes even incorporation.

Outsourcing is a way to reduce tax liabilities because with the expenses being incurred with the outsourcing process, the company can sometimes be assessed for a lower income tax. In an era where companies do their utmost to streamline tax outlays and other expenditures to achieve the maximum possible efficiency, this can prove to be a winning edge in a very competitive arena.

Outsourcing can also save the contractor money because a lot of foreign outsourcing destinations offer tax incentives to entice companies to avail of the services of locally-based suppliers. These can take the form of regional tax perks or income tax relief, and is a factor whose effect is usually taken into consideration early on in the outsourcing process.

Other Benefits

Outsourcing also offers other advantages apart from the reduction in tax liabilities. It enables access to a larger labour pool whose talents may have been previously inaccessible had the contracting organisation chosen to keep the process in-house; the service provided is backed by a binding contract with legal redress; the provider can give higher-quality service than possible within the parent organisation; it reduces time-to-market; and if and when the outsourced function is no longer needed, the contract can be terminated and the services either given to another supplier or taken back into the company that outsourced it in the first place.

Exceeded its outsourcing prediction

2007-12-20T01:07:00.000-08:00

The Philippines have exceeded its outsourcing prediction.

This was the general view of the research report conducted by the advisory firm XMG. According to the report, the Philippines could experience an annual growth rate of 62% thus surpassing the outsourcing growth expected in other outsourcing countries such as China, India, and Malaysia.

Different factors which could attribute to this trends was also mentioned in the study stating that:
"The cost of operations in top outsourcing destinations is increasing due to wage hikes needed to retain good people, coupled with rising real estate prices and the effect of accelerated currency appreciation in Asia."

I think that the Philippines also possess qualities that every outsourcing destination has. The only problem here is the marketing strategy that these countries have. In this department, countries should think of suitable and attractive ways to attract clients so as to promote their country in the world of outsourcing.

Thanks to Carol Kendrick and to the THE OUTSOURCING WEBLOG

Choosing Passive Recruitment Services

2007-12-18T02:19:00.000-08:00

There are literally hundreds of different recruitment services on the market today and each and every one of them is different from each other. There are very aggressive recruitment services and there are passive recruitment services as well. Many people are choosing to work with the passive recruitment services as they use a gentler method in comparison to the mass marketing skills of the more aggressive agencies.

The reason people are becoming more interested in passive recruitment services is because they have stronger connections with large companies and they maintain these relationships for a longer period of time than many of these more aggressive recruitment services. In comparison the passive recruitment services take a more professional and less pushy approach to job openings and for job seekers. The aggressive companies use force; email marketing, web marketing and telephone marketing to not only push their services to not only new members but new clients as well. Many companies find this to be irritating and more of an annoyance than anything else. This is only one reason why the passive recruitment services are becoming more and more popular because of their professionalism and passive methods.

Within passive recruitment services you can find a large variety of career opportunities such as you can with any other type of recruitment services. They offer career openings within:

• Financial Industry
• Telecommunications
• Web Design/Creations
• Industrial

This is just a small example of the many different career field options you can find within these passive recruitment services. Although they use a different marketing strategy to expose not only their business but your resume as well, they still offer the same benefits that any other recruitment company offers.

As a company dealing with a recruitment service, they may come to the conclusion that the companies who are really try to push their clients are not fully screening them and are in it for the profits only. When they deal with passive recruitment services they get the impression that the resume they are marketing is not only experienced but something they may be interested in. Of course these reactions are not seen by all companies but in general, the more things are pushed on someone or something the more suspicious they become about the motives behind it.

There are dozens of passive recruitment services you can choose from which offer job opportunities within Fortune 500 companies and more. Take this professional and passive approach to see the difference in your future career. Choosing a passive recruitment services only takes a simple Google search.

RPO Leaders Gather for Groundbreaking Summit

2007-12-17T01:27:00.001-08:00

WASHINGTON DC, December 14 /PRNewswire/ -- Over 150 executives met at the First Annual RPO Summit to discuss the issues and opportunities facing the Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) industry. Summit delegates came together for this historic meeting to advance the state and practice of RPO. They examined critical issues, including standards and practices, technology, contract governance, and relationship management. Convened under the authority of the RPO Alliance, the leading trade association for RPO practitioners and providers, the Summit brought together the top minds in this industry to help shape its future.

Delegates included representatives from over 80 separate companies, including recruitment executives from Fortune 500 companies, RPO providers, recruitment technology companies, sourcing advisors, and attorneys. Drawn from seven different countries, the delegates represented a tremendous cross section of the field of recruitment. "Bringing these organizations together represents a tremendous step forward for our industry," said Jason Berkowitz, Chair of the RPO Alliance and SVP for Business Development at Hyrian. "We accomplished a lot as an industry."

The speakers and panelists at the Summit focused the attention of the delegates on the future of RPO and the role they and the RPO Alliance will play in helping shape it. "The RPO Alliance decided to inaugurate the Summit with a focus on accelerating the professionalism of RPO," said Richard Crespin, Global Executive Director of the HROA. "It was truly amazing to see the depth and breadth of experience already existing in this industry and to see the potential for the future."

Summit delegates gained a lot of insights and had the opportunity to network with one another throughout the Summit. "Attending the RPO Summit delivered tremendous value to Taleo as a company," said Barry Mills, HRO/RPO Alliance Executive, Taleo. "As new members of the RPO Alliance and the HROA, we have already started to receive a return on our investment and we look forward to playing an active role in shaping the RPO industry."

According to Karen Browne, the Chief Operating Officer at PeopleScout, "The RPO Summit was an effective venue in sparking a dialogue among thought leaders and RPO providers around critical topics within the emerging RPO landscape. PeopleScout was delighted to participate as a sponsor and looks forward to other valuable collaborations from the RPO Alliance."

"This was a great event and I can't say enough good things about it. I have a list of takeaways from this - many new connections and tons of ideas!" said David Barbato, CEO of Talent Retriever. "I can assure you the inaugural event was a big hit," said Anthea Collier, Regional VP for Momentum.

Details on the findings of the Summit can be found in the Proceedings of the First Annual RPO Summit available at https://www.hroassociation.org/file/3475/recruitment-process-outsourcing-all iance.html. (Due to the length of this URL, it may be necessary to copy and paste this hyperlink into your internet brower's URL address field. Remove the space if one exists.) The RPO Alliance has already begun planning the Second Annual RPO Summit. Details on speaking, attending, or sponsoring the Summit can be obtained by contacting Adam Bleifeld at +1-202-905-0351 x19 or at adam.bleifeld@hroa.org.

About the HROA

The HROA is the only professional membership association committed to promoting the advancement of human resources transformation in complex organizations. The mission of the HROA is to support the Human Resources Outsourcing industry (HRO) through education, advocacy and the promotion of best practices. As a membership organization, we provide online and offline networking, best practices and independent commentary on the evolution of HR transformation. For more information visit: http://www.hroa.org.

About the RPO Alliance

The RPO Alliance, a Special Interest Group of the HROA, promotes the advancement of recruitment process outsourcing. The RPO Alliance works to improve the practice of RPO through better business tools and practices, research, and peer-to-peer connections. As a membership organization, we provide online and offline networking, best practices and independent commentary on the evolution of recruitment process transformation. For more information visit: http://www.hroa.org.

It is still a business of touch.

2007-12-09T00:43:00.002-08:00

It is tradeshow season...or at the very least, the next wave of tradeshows has arrived. This week I attended a show in San Francisco as an Exhibitor. I always enjoy the opportunity to talk about our product and listen to other companies promote their products and services, but the thing that rejuvenates me each and every time is the engaging conversations happening inside, outside and during the information sessions.

Some of the best tips I’ve ever heard, were usually offered over a bagel and coffee during a break. Some of the best ideas are born out of spirited debates during a break out session. There’s always something new, different and open for consideration. Some of the best ideas and learning happens in the art of networking. And you’ll never be able to completely automate or codify good networking. While we’re working on buying more time, the overriding theme I heard from corporate recruiters, staffing professionals and consultants is the importance of learning to master the art of relationships – identification, maintenance and endurance.

As we explore Web 2.0 and what that means and does not mean to recruiting, as we work to optimize tools and streamline processes and metric ourselves into well oiled machines...I hope the one thing we never lose, is the element of touch. So much of what makes recruiting rewarding is bringing people to the right career at the right time. The best recruiters I’ve ever known are not only proficient; they are passionate about the significance of what they do. They are advocates, career counselors and professional seers. Good recruiters impact lives. Hokey? Possibly, but still valid. Sometimes I wonder if all the solutions that are born everyday to take some of the “time” out of the process aren’t also taking some of the “think” out of the process. As we try to endear ourselves to the ones who determine out yearly recruiting budgets, it is so easy to make it all about the process, and less about the skill and art of recruiting. We forget, touch.

The element of relationship building is a critical skill that some people are born with, but most learn over time. There’s no way to automate that. There is no solution on the market to cheat your way through that vital step in our process. All the employment brands, candidate experience packaging and metrics maneuvering will never replace the ability to identify talent, nurture it, present it effectively and close the deal. Our business is still the business of touch.

This week, I watched people sharing ideas. I watched people talking about their experiences, comparing notes on technology and different ways to touch people where they live, work and play. I also heard a lot of metrics and numberese. But one point remained crystal clear:

All the tools, processes and automation will definitely make us faster but developing the talent that is searching for the talent, will truly make us better.

A Perfect Hiring Storm: Scarce talent and Bad Press

2007-12-09T00:43:00.001-08:00

If the lack of skilled workers is creating a hiring void in your neck of the woods, brace yourself as poor employer brand begins to create the Perfect Storm.

I read a great article today by career and business coach Debbie Benami-Rahm, who has lots to say about employee engagement -- and the earlier, the better. Check this out:

The way your organization handles the interview and hiring process either brings you the talent you want or scares your talent away.

Bingo. And when it comes to onboarding new employees, Debbie adds:

Research shows it takes nearly 90 days of employment for new employees to really evaluate the information they receive during the recruiting and onboarding process. After 90 days, they step back and look at their experiences with the culture of the company, their peers and managers, and their training. Those experiences tell them whether they and their jobs are a good fit and whether they see themselves building a career within the organization. Those experiences dictate whether they stay with the company. This is one of the first solution keys to your employee retention challenge.

Debbie, I couldn't agree with you more that workforce engagement begins from the moment of initial contact with potential employees. Ten years ago recruiting leaders thought in terms of an "employer driven" or "candidate driven" marketplace, but no longer; in today's increasingly global and competitive landscape for talent, the rules change while we sleep. Employers that are slow to incorporate critical elements of early candidate engagement are already beginning to discover that retention is only the tip of the iceberg: the challenge of competing for a scarce, electronically connected talent pool has the potential to devastate a bottom line with longterm vacancies.

Something to think about while global internet usage grows annually in triple digits, US jobs continue to move overseas by the millions, baby boomers slip off into the sunset wearing Hawaiian shirts and flip flops, and slumbering economies in other parts of the world wake up with a vengeance.

War for talent, anyone?

Keeping Passive Candidates in Orbit -- a webcast

2007-12-09T00:38:00.000-08:00

Hi there! Claudia and I will be conducting a national webcast on Tuesday, November 13th. This Human Capital Institute program is being sponsored by PeopleClick, which means that it is complementary for you to attend. If you'd like to join us, please sign up today via either of the links below:

http://www.humancapitalinstitute.org/hci/tracks_creating_talent_pipeline.guid

http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=6958589803&ref=mf

See you there!

Is your company considering or already using recruitment process outsourcing services?

2007-12-02T02:17:00.001-08:00

If so, be sure to get the research you need to make the right purchasing decisions. ERE's new report, Recruitment Process Outsourcing 2006: An Assessment of Outsourcing Prevalence and Effectiveness has all of the information you need about the leading recruitment process outsourcing service providers.

The past year has seen a dramatic increase in recruitment outsourcing service offerings targeted toward corporate HR departments. These offerings are loosely described as "Recruitment Process Outsourcing" (RPO) and may include, in all or in part, every recruiting-related activity stopping short of making a hire.

Outsourced activities range from strategic (workforce planning) to the administrative (generating offer letters) and nearly always involve sourcing candidates. The RPO services firm may hire the displaced recruiters of the company they are now servicing. The services firm may be responsible for all hiring of a certain class of worker, such as non-exempt positions. Contract recruiters may be located at a client site, but often service the client remotely. RPO services firms may help a company re-engineer its recruiting department by standardizing processes; they may write job descriptions; they may facilitate the transition from candidate to new hire.

Whatever the arrangement, the service firms are expected to reduce recruiting department costs and increase efficiencies, or at least maintain cost and service neutrality. They are expected to enhance the quality of the candidates delivered to hiring managers, and they are expected to demonstrate the effectiveness of their sourcing methods.

In the spring and summer of 2006, ERE invited from its community HR executives, directors, and managers at corporations to participate in a web-based survey about Recruitment Process Outsourcing. ERE analyzed 334 qualified responses from organizations across a variety of industries, company sizes, and locations. Major questions addressed in the research include the following:

Which recruitment activities and functions are most extensively outsourced?
What type of services firms are recruitment activities and functions outsourced?
What are the key business drivers for outsourcing recruitment activities and functions, and in what order of importance?
What types of jobs are outsourced, across which job families?

Concurrently, ERE conducted detailed interviews with a number of RPO vendors about the depth of their service offerings, their perspective on recruiting processes, and their approach to building end-to-end processes for their customers. ERE interviewed RPO customers about their reasons for outsourcing and their expectations, the depth and scope of their engagements, their relative satisfaction with their service provider, and how they will measure success.

Recruitment Process Outsourcing 2006 was produced with the assistance of talent management consulting firm The Newman Group (TNG). The report contains two articles authored by the firm's leading experts on recruitment practice change management and RPO selection. TNG was instrumental in establishing the blueprint for evaluating the vendor's capabilities in the area of RPO, and in bringing RPO to ERE's attention as business area worthy of in-depth research. TNG also contributed knowledge about its RPO experience in the December 2005 issue of ERE's Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership.

Summary of Select Research Findings

Full lifecycle RPO is not prevalent among the survey respondents. Half of all survey respondents indicated they outsourced all or part of their recruiting function; half said they did not. Of the 165 respondents that indicated they did not outsource any part of their recruiting activities or functions, only 9% said they would do so in the near future.
Most respondents consider the use of a third-party search firm recruitment outsourcing. Of those that indicated outsourcing recruitment, 57% said they used a professional staffing firm, and 66% said they used more than one vendor, specifically to augment acute hiring needs or fill niche positions.
Sourcing, background checking and drug testing, and screening and assessment are the most commonly outsourced processes among the survey respondents. These services are provided by all vendor types – professional staffing firms, RPO services firms, HR consulting firms, and technology vendors.
Cost savings alone is not the most important reason for outsourcing recruitment. organizations want to increase their recruiting effectiveness by delivering better-quality candidates to hiring managers.

The Future of RPO Points Toward International Opportunities, Recruiting Efforts

2007-12-02T02:10:00.000-08:00

The Future of RPO Points Toward International Opportunities, Recruiting Efforts

Feb. 5, 2007 - Findlay, Ohio - Increased demand from multi-national companies and a greater emphasis on recruiting and staffing will generate the biggest buzz in the recruitment process outsourcing (RPO) industry in 2007 and beyond.

The RightThing, Inc., an end-to-end RPO provider, delivered a brief statement to analysts this week providing a positive outlook for an industry that's made a name for itself in North America and will soon expand overseas.

"Partnerships will emerge between US and international RPO firms," said Terry Terhark, president and founder of The RightThing. "More and more contracts will include a global component. RPO firms in North America will develop a delivery model that supports most areas of the world."

The move toward worldwide RPO is expected to build momentum in late 2007 then hit the industry to stay in 2008, according to Terhark. He added that the talent pool and sheer numbers in the workforce in areas such as Asia Pacific will be unable to be ignored.

"Companies will continue to examine and execute on RPO decisions," Terhark said. "Due to the war for talent, companies have to be sure they're getting access to the very best talent, in North America or anywhere else. RPO firms will continue to evolve and be able to provide solutions to meet the changing needs of the world's best companies."

As Human Resource Outsourcing (HRO) firms continue to meet the challenges of the RPO piece of the engagement, HRO firms will step up their partnerships with RPO firms to deliver recruiting and staffing services.

"HRO firms that have either built and in-house RPO delivery engine or have partnered with RPO firms will have a market differentiator," Terhark said.

Cindy Caldwell, an industry consultant with EquaTerra, which focuses on providing global corporations with advisory and relationship management services for their business support processes, agrees.

"RPO firms are evolving their recruiting models to better match the customers' needs," Caldwell said. "Historically, RPO firms have been strong on process and weak on actual recruiting. Now, many RPO firms are building robust recruiting delivery capability. They're also building in-house expertise in many functional areas."

Other trends for 2007 identified by The RightThing include:

Industry consolidation: With many firms entering the RPO space, look for definition and standards to emerge as the industry evolves.
Larger contracts: As large corporations continue to recognize the strategic and business benefits of RPO, large contracts of this size and scope - and larger - will become more commonplace.
Demand for an RPO strategic partner: Companies will look at RPO firms as more than a vendor. They will expect RPO firms to bring forth new ideas and fully understands a client's issues.
Consultative/Selling approach to staffing: A recruiter can't be a "yes man." The RPO firm must support "change management.
New recruitment skill sets: RPO firms will be continually asked to find ways to attract the passive non-job seekers.
Metrics: The demand will be to measure results as the key to identifying issues and make improvements before they become problems.
Technology: Specifically, RPO firms will provide the expertise for managing a process within a system and integration with other systems.
Reporting: The ability for companies to pull ad hoc, real-time reports is becoming the standard expectation - and at a reduced cost.

Founded in 2003, The RightThing has experienced exponential financial growth at a rate of 250 percent year after year. Employee growth has also been tremendous. Total employment was 29 at the end of its first year and now stands at 250 employees today.

The RightThing assists organizations in accomplishing their hiring goals and objectives by streamlining hiring processes for large corporations through outsourcing. The company has worked in a variety of industries and claims organizations such as Merck, Unisys, Cardinal Health, U.S. Steel and many others as clients.

About The RightThing
The RightThing, Inc. is an end-to-end recruitment process outsource provider. Through a customized execution, The RightThing delivers design, administrative and consulting services to businesses spanning pharmaceutical, financial, consumer, transportation and public utility industries. For more information please visit http://www.rightthinginc.com.

Media contact:
Sara Thigpen
The RightThing, Inc.
Office - 847-543-683
Cell - 847-421-1824
Sara.thigpen@rightthinginc.com

2007-10-25T12:37:00.000-07:00

10 Questions to Ask Before Outsourcing

2007-10-18T12:30:00.002-07:00

Find out some of the most common problems that come along with outsourcing,
particularly with technology initiatives. These problems include the lack of an escape
clause; too little preparation for cultural issues, such as unhappy employees and
managers; and a failure to first figure out whether the outsourcing effort will really
provide a return on investment.
By Samuel Greengard
The complexity of today’s human resources management systems and the technical
demands placed on an organization--and its IT department--are leading many companies
down the path of business process outsourcing.
But achieving success is no simple matter. Not only is it important to know when to
outsource, but it’s also essential to know how to use outsourcing to full advantage. Here
are 10 questions that industry guru Naomi Bloom says organizations should ask before
embracing human resources BPO:
• Does the outsourcing opportunity match the organization’s business needs?
If an outsourcing initiative can create a strategic advantage, then it’s worth
pursuing. If it’s merely intended to deal with temporary tactical problems--such as
a reluctance to invest in an upgrade to a core HRMS while revenues are down--
then it’s doomed to failure.
• Will outsourcing improve performance? A successful outsourcing initiative
translates into service that is better than it would be if an organization handled the
tasks internally. Before turning to BPO, it’s important to ask how and why it will
drive improvements.
• How can an organization that turns to outsourcing develop excellent human
resources generalists, specialists and experts in managing vendor
relationships? Remaining human resources executives and managers use metrics
and other measurements to ensure that the company is managing its initiatives and
relationships well and meeting business goals.
• How can an organization understand and control costs? It’s essential to
understand the cost structure for various components of outsourcing, particularly
if the entire package of products and services is bundled into a single fee.
• How can outsourcing affect the organization in an acquisition, merger or sale
of a peripheral business? Any structural change to the organization can create
new challenges and alter the dynamics of the business. It’s wise to understand
such implications up front.
• Are the financial projections accurate? Take a critical look at the numbers,
particularly those generated by a vendor, and try to spot assumptions, oversimplifications
or just plain misleading figures.
• Are adequate protections in place for when business conditions change?
Make sure that the proposed contract protects your organization as much as it
protects the outsourcing provider. Your business may look quite different three to
five years from now.
• What are the cultural ramifications of BPO? How will managers and
employees react to the changes? Will these individuals view the new system as a
positive or a negative? How can such reactions affect the success of the initiative?
Is it possible that these individuals will walk out if they see a major upheaval?
• Who will manage the financial and performance aspects of the project?
Without people, processes and technology to measure and manage the
outsourcing initiative, an organization can find itself overspending and
underachieving. Factoring the management aspects of the task into the initial
proposal can reduce the odds of problems occurring later on.
• Is there an escape strategy? If the BPO provider fails to live up to expectations--
even with a solid service-level agreement in place--or if the vendor is acquired by
another firm that has been previously rejected (because of management style,
ethics, customer-service track record, technology, geographic coverage or other
factor), there must be a way to make a change without enduring a crippling
disruption.

The Big 3 Efficiency Metrics in Recruiting

2007-10-18T12:30:00.001-07:00

Doug Fuehne, Co-founder and Vice President of Client Services, Scalability, and Strategy
Q4B, Inc. (Quantum Solutions for Business)
www.q4b.com

Measuring success is critical in recruiting. There are four general types of metrics on which to concentrate -- cost, quality, quantity, and time. One way we measure "quality" is using the Big 3 Efficiency metrics.

Efficiency is a funny thing. It can mean many different things to different people. For example, the Laws of Thermodynamics tell us that any engine or machine is doing very well if it is operating at 80% efficiency, which means that 80% of the energy input is turned into useful work. They also tell us that NO machine can operate at 100% efficiency.

In recruiting, efficiency measures how well recruiters are doing their job and effectiveness of the recruiting process. At Q4B, our Big 3 metrics are:
1. submittal efficiency,
2. interview efficiency, and
3. offer efficiency.

Submittal Efficiency
The first, submittal efficiency, is a measure of how well the submitted candidates fit against the requisition profile. It is defined as the number of candidates interviewed divided by the total number of candidates submitted. You would expect this number to be high. However, as in Thermodynamics, it can be TOO high. If it is 100%, the recruiter is not pushing the edges of the requisition specifications, which means you are probably missing good candidates.

However, if your submittal efficiency is too low, it indicates the hiring managers are spending too much time reviewing resumes. This could be because the recruiter may be doing a poor job, or perhaps the requisition has been poorly specified. As a whole, hiring managers and recruiters are doing well if three of every four submittals make it to interviews (75% efficiency). Flashing-red-light warnings should start to go off if less than one in two (50% efficiency) make it to interviews, meaning it is time to investigate to determine problem areas.

Interview Efficiency
Next, the interview efficiency is a measure of the hiring manager's screening process. It is defined as the number of candidates who receive offers divided by the number of candidates interviewed. You would expect this number to be lower than the submittal efficiency, since most people want to interview several candidates for one offer. The goal is to shoot for 30% efficiency, which means your organization is making offers to one out of every three to four interviewed candidates. If less than one in six candidates interviewed actually receives an offer (16% efficiency), it should be an indicator that it is time to investigate again. With low efficiencies there could be any number of problems, most of which are issues in the screening process, including a hiring manager who is overly selective. However, recruiters can be great assets during this phase because they can help out with scheduling interviews, prepping candidates, gathering immediate interview feedback, and generally guiding the process.

Offer Efficiency
The third of the Big 3 is the offer efficiency, a measure of how many candidates actually accept your offers and start working with you. It is calculated as the number of candidates accepting offers divided by the total number of offers. Since the recruiters should be helping hiring managers extend offers that will be accepted, as well as pre-closing the candidates, we expect this ratio to be high. If the process yields 80% offer efficiency, or four out of five offers are accepted, you are doing well. Conversely, if less than three in five offers are accepted (60% efficiency), then something in your recruiting processes will need to be modified or addressed. Low offer efficiencies could mean the recruiter is doing a poor job of pre-closing the candidate or negating counteroffers. Or perhaps the offers themselves are undesirable, whether from a financial standpoint or on other dimensions, such as too much travel or an undesirable work location. Also, as with submittal efficiencies, the offer efficiencies percentage can be too high. If 100% of people accept your offers, perhaps you are offering too much money for the job.

The efficiency metrics are relatively easy to gather and calculate, and very helpful in monitoring the quality of the recruiting process. By investigating the issues indicated by the efficiencies, it's possible to identify potential problem areas in sufficient time to take corrective action and still make hires on time.

Another benefit of the efficiency ratios is that by multiplying all three of them together, it's possible to calculate the expected number of hires from the number of submittals, assisting your planning process. For example, multiplying the lower bound of the "good" efficiencies (75% X 30% X 80%) = 18%, which means you need to submit between five and six candidates to get one hire.

Have an efficient recruiting day!

Does Your RPO Vendor Comprendo Your Culture?

2007-10-18T12:29:00.000-07:00

So you've elected to outsource a portion of your recruitment process - that's a big step for your company. The demand is certainly justified since you've got lots of open requisitions and hiring managers are crying for quality applicants to fill their positions. All the prospective RPO vendors are asking about the nature of the positions as they seek job descriptions and compensation bands. Obviously their understanding of the open positions is important and the more data they have available will improve their prospecting. Put aside for a moment judging whether they can actually fill the positions you need filled. When you got into conversations with them, how much did they attempt to understand the personality desired for the positions and about the culture of your firm overall? Did they truly grasp your business model and how each role, in some way, contributes to the organization? While some RPO firm's practical fit might look right on paper during the bidding process, ascertaining the overall cultural compatibility between you and your RPO firm is crucial to your mutual success.

(HR Outsourcing consistently emphasizes the need for strong cultural compatibility when selecting the right vendor. The typical demands of cultural compatibility revolve around how well a vendor's representatives assimilate into the client's corporate personality, pace, demands, schedules, vernacular, etc.)

Now think about how the need for a cultural match is magnified when selecting a Recruitment Process Outsourcing partner. Not only is the vendor trying to figure out the nuances of the client environment, but the RPO firm is now on the hook for absorbing the client's culture well enough to attract the next waves of talent to the organization! Adopting the client's corporate culture needs to happen quickly and convincingly.

So, what are some of the indicators companies should look for when selecting an RPO firm to know how good of a "cultural sponge" they can be?

Professionalism during the bid process
Did they communicate well throughout the process? Treat you respectfully, arrive on time, and stick to deadlines on their deliverable schedules during the bid? Did they communicate to your satisfaction in person, by phone and using email? How comfortable were they when handling objections or challenges?

Speaking your Business Language
Did they take the time to understand your business? Did you find their language to quickly mirror yours? Do they have relevant experience in your industry that will expedite the assimilation into your organization? Do they have experience with clients that are experiencing the same challenges faced by your organization?

Metrics/Accountability
Metrics are necessities in outsourcing relationships yet vendors embrace metrics differently. When selecting the right RPO firm, you want the level of detail from metrics to match how your company appreciates the quantitative side of relationships. Did the prospective vendor not only grasp why your suggested metrics are important ("if we do well here it will contribute to the success of my client's business") but suggest appropriate industry metrics that also can help contribute to your success? Are they altogether resistant to metrics?

Technology adoption
Can they plug into what you have? Can they bring what you don't have? Either way, you need someone who understands what you need and trust they have the experience and know-how to deliver it. In addition, they'll need to understand your organization's ability to integrate technology - can they do that?

Thorough Communication
Do they "get" that your organization's hiring managers aren't very technologically savvy and will need more than normal training on the technologies you bring to the table? Do they "get" how much hiring managers were previously involved in recruitment and that it will take many conversations and much time to wean them off their old ways? If an RPO vendor doesn't have the ability to understand and assimilate with your firm's culture - simply from a missed, incorrect, or lack of communication perspective - absolute failure of the engagement is a strong possibility.

Are the RPO's recruiters Full-Time Employees or Contractors
The RPO firm that has full-time associates may have a more loyal following of recruiters who are more familiar with the RPO relationship model. Their commitment to your project also extends beyond the engagement and may have a broader sense of ownership in making sure they help deliver a quality project for you as a client and for their company.

Compliance
EEOC, OFCCP and other areas of compliance in recruitment vary widely by industry and company size. Make sure the RPO firm understands your specific recruitment compliance needs and is not intimidated to go as far as your company is required to go.

References
Seek at least two client case studies to contact ideally similar to your RPO project. Get a feel for the relationship, level of communication, and results realized from their experiences. Did they previously do a good job, or did they do a good job and were well liked?

The X Factor
At the end of the day, if they feel like a vendor they're just a vendor. Getting the right RPO firm means you've found a new business partner - an extension of your own company. At the end of the day, you must be aligned that their success is your success and your success is their success…so, do they comprendo?

By Matt Aprahamian and Brad Cummings, Monument Consulting

Offshoring RPO - Is it for you?

2007-10-18T12:26:00.000-07:00

Offshoring is defined as the transfer of a business process to a foreign country to take advantage of the lower cost of operations in the foreign location.

Offshore Recruitment Process Outsourcing thus, can be defined as when some or all of the recruitment processes are outsourced at an overseas location to take advantage of the labor wage arbitrage.

Companies sometimes look at offshoring a select non-core group of functions that makes their internal teams more productive and thus improves the hiring manager satisfaction with the internal recruitment department.

However automated the recruitment process has become, a large portion of the recruiters time is still taken up with resume searching (Job Boards, ATS), Internet mining/sourcing, resume screening, response management, candidates processing (online technical tests, assessment centers) and other functions which, when managed correctly, can be successfully outsourced.

Most recruiters would rather utilize their time with business development, building relationships and networking candidates or spending time with their hiring mangers than undertaking many of these outsourceable functions.

Services that offshore RPO companies offer:

Candidate Sourcing or Resume Mining: The offshore company can search your own database, ATS, their own database of candidates, job boards, search engines, blogs and forums to build a candidate pool. In many cases, due to the time difference, the offshore company will help reduce your time to fill by looking for the best active and passive candidates while your team in the US is sleeping.
Job Marketing: Some offshore companies can help you write more effective job descriptions to improve the candidate response rate. They can advise you on what job boards to use to optimize candidate quality. Others may offer more vanilla offerings like taking on the work of posting jobs on the various job boards and community websites and keeping them updated. By keeping the job current, your posting will be viewed by many more candidates.
Resume Screening: Tired out looking at unqualified resumes that don't fit the requisition? Recruiters are often inundated by resumes when advertising on job boards. Screening resume costs the recruiter a lot of time when their focus should be on building relationships and networking. Offshore companies can help screen resumes to find the best matches.
Calendaring or Interview Scheduling: You can give away the onerous task of scheduling interviews and making travel arrangements for interviews etc to a staffing coordinator based offshore.
Technical Interviews: Some offshore RPO companies offer assistance regarding conducting in-depth phone interviews or even technical interviews. The strong education, and sometimes technical, background of the recruiters does help here. You can use the offshore company to do a phone interview with the candidate and understand the candidate's motivation for a job change. The recruiters can evaluate at the candidates on role fitment, aptitude and attitude. Your choice of vendor becomes critical here. - some companies come very close to US onsite recruiters interims of evaluating candidates and building a strong relationship.
Reference Check & Background Screening: Offshore companies to do offer reference check and background screening services.

Who should consider RPO?
Contrary to what people may believe, even one person independent recruiters can look at offshoring to increase their productivity. A lot of recruiters I connect with spend about 60-70% of their time looking for resumes, screening them, scheduling interviews etc. Almost all of them feel that their time can be better spent on developing client and candidate relationships or networking.

For larger companies, the decision is easier. They can offshore activities that are non core and keep the high value add activities for in-house recruiters. This not only increases the recruiter's productivity but also their job satisfaction.

Are you ready for offshore RPO?
The following checklist will help determine if you are ready of offshore some of the recruitment functions.
I am looking to solve the following problems (check all that apply):

Your recruiters are spending too much time on job boards- searching for resumes and then screening unqualified resume responses
You feel your recruiters should be spending more time on the phone building relationships
Your hiring manager is dissatisfied and breathing down your neck to reduce the time to hire
Your recruiting budget has been slashed and you are being asked to deliver more with less
You want a focused group looking for diversity candidates.

Building blocks of a successful offshore RPO relationship

Get executive buy in: Any outsourcing decision impacts the organization. When you decide to outsource some or all of your recruitment functions, you must make sure there is a top executive who wants this initiative to succeed.
SLAs and Deliverables: Establish clear SLAs that establish services requirements and key deliverables. Vendors adhering to a strict set of SLA's with clear process guidelines, targets and QA procedures should remove the majority of service a delivery uncertainties.
Assign a dedicated executive: Depending on the amount of work offshored, you need to have someone from your firm dedicated, full time or part time, into managing the relationships with the vendor. The vendor should know who to go to in case they have a problem.
Contracts: A lot of people I meet with say "offshoring is too difficult" or "offshoring doesn't work". A large portion of "reasons for failure" for offshoring can be avoided with strong contracts between the client and vendor. However, one word of caution here- the state of local laws in some of the offshore countries is abysmal so pursuing contract grievances against vendors that are solely based in an offshore location is a nightmare. Look for companies that have US presence.
Communication channels: You need to have a clear communication channel for work to flow between the vendor firm and yours and vice versa. Make sure you have the escalation procedures in place in case deliverables get delayed.
Be patient: Don't look for offshoring to secure a quick win- offshoring has to be a long term strategy. It is like a new team you have added thousands of miles away- no matter how good they are, they will take a little time to understand your business, your company culture, the way you interact with your candidates, your clients and your employees.

Implementing a successful outsourcing program is usually a complex process but when managed correctly, will yield major rewards and ROI.

Authored by: RadixThink (www.radixthink.com)

What Does chinzman from globalsrvcs Say on oRPO

2007-10-18T12:23:00.000-07:00

In responding to some articles on all corner of mass media disclosing the secrets of Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) business which is currently booming. I totally agree that this is a new "baby" booming business. It is reasonable, since there are more and more facilities supporting the operation of this service.
I have a story about a successful oRPO business company which is growing fast in Bali Indonesia. Many people and investors are pessimistic in doing this kind of business in developing countries especially, country with geographic location in which lots of natural diasters happening frequently. This is a real story I have ever heard. It was unbelievable when I had holiday and spent several hours talking with the RPO director in terms of his successful RPO business. High speed internet connection with Vip enables him and his expert staff communicate with all the Big 4 and the Big 5 clients in the USA. Working offshore from the distance and remote are like Bali is really odds for everyone but that it is.The result is really onside. Even much better those who doing the same business onsite. Form this point, I think REPO business in more effective done in the developing countries and Indonesia is the best place for this business since the infrastructure is getting better and manpower is liable, qualified and negotiable in terms of compensation.
If you want to dig more information this business possibilities in Indonesia, you may visit www.globalsrvcs.com or email: chinzmanglobalsrvcs.com

Offshore Recruitment Process outsourcing will underpin growth in 2007 - InterSect

2007-10-18T12:21:00.000-07:00

Staffing Services PLC has today launched a trial which will see its InterSelect business ‘offshore’ part of its talent management to OS2i in Pune, India.

"Offshore RPO is not a new concept," said Tyler Evans, Managing Director of Staffing Services. "As a business we have been watching it closely to see where we can utilise it to cut our fee earners non-core activities.

"We have selected OS2i, the leader in oRPO to undertake our candidate search function at their facility in Pune, India. It is anticipated this will save up to 4 hours per fee earner per day in screening CV’s for suitability."

Nick Davenport of OS2i commented, “OS2i took the bold step of pioneering Offshore Recruitment Process Outsourcing oRPO over 4 years ago and since then has continually refined and expanded the services we offer. We are excited about this new partnership with InterSelect and are looking forward to becoming an integrated part of their resourcing solution.”

Initially InterSelect will be offshoring 25% of its talent management function. Subject to successful results, the firm will seek to outsource 100% of its talent function to OS2i to include candidate searching, name gathering, vacancy management and non core recruitment administration activities.

The Science of Recruiting

2007-10-15T09:48:00.000-07:00

Hie Friends,

I am sending you few details which I gathered related to recruitement process which can be helpful in process.

The Science of Recruiting – Part 1: Making First Contact

The Science of Recruiting. Over the next ten weeks, we'll look at every skill and technique necessary to be a great recruiter. At the end of it all, you'll have a sense of what you need to do to take your performance and success as a recruiter up another notch or two, or maybe more.

Recruiting is a multi-phase process that leads to the discovery of a perfect job match. It starts with an intricate knowledge of what the job requires. Finding top candidates is another part of this process, and is assessing candidate competency. Interspersed throughout these activities is the recruiting, convincing, and influencing part. Recruiting isn't heavy-handed, in-your-face selling, it's finesse. It's about convincing top candidates to stay involved even though their kids don't want to move. It's about convincing a hiring manager to see a top person even though he or she doesn't have all of the experience that had been originally demanded. Recruiting is about taking a fuzzy, imperfect, human process and using it to find and place perfect candidates. The profession of recruiting will always be a bit of a black art, but in the effort to make hiring top people a systematic business process, trying to find science where we can will most certainly be a useful effort.

The Basic Recruiting Process

We all know that the best candidates are more discriminating and therefore have more concerns, have more opportunities, need more information, and require more hand-holding. The ability to hire top people correlates directly with a recruiter's ability to provide this information in a professional manner.

This first Science of Recruiting article will provide recruiters with the tools they need to do just that.

As many of you know I divide the recruiting process into four primary areas

Candidate Development - all sourcing activity(except for networking) Processing - processing of resumes, care and feeding of tracking system, administrative tasks Red Zone - working one-on-one with strong candidates and hiring managers, taking the search assignment, assessing and presenting candidates, networking End Zone - negotiating and closing offers.

It is my opinion that hiring top people requires exceptional one-on-one skills, in the Red Zone and the End Zone. Administrative processing should be minimized, and some of the initial sourcing activity should be assigned to a research group if possible.

Recruiters need to proactively minimize administrative work and organize their daily activities to be in constant phone contact with top candidates. How well this is done will determine a recruiter's personal success. The Science of Recruiting articles describes how best to do this. Here are the core topics we'll be discussing during this series:

The Science of Recruiting – Key Topics

1. How to Make First Contact with a Top Person - Engage 1st, Network 2nd 2. The Art of Networking - The Difference Between Good, and Great Recruiters 3. Overcoming Basic Candidate Concerns 4. Overcoming More Serious Candidate Concerns 5. Addressing Mid-stage Candidate Concerns 6. Influencing Hiring Managers - Taking the Assignment 7. Influencing Hiring Managers - Presenting Candidates 8. Influencing Hiring Managers - The Hiring Decision 9. Negotiating and Closing Offers - The Set-up 10. Negotiating and Closing Offers - Testing and Closing

So, let's get started. In this first session we'll describe how to make first contact with a top person.

A top person can be an active candidate who is exceptionally well-qualified, or a referred candidate whom you know little about, other than that the person is well-qualified. Well-qualified people always have multiple opportunities, so how you first approach them is critical. Two basic ground rules of good recruiting apply at this initial stage.

Recruiting Ground Rule #1: Only talk to pre-qualified candidates.

Recruiters don't have time to talk to marginal candidates. To minimize time spent on unqualified candidates you must pre-qualify everyone before you ever look at their resumes, or call them on the phone.

Finding top candidates on job boards takes too much work, that's one of the reasons I don't think much time should be spent using this channel. Done correctly, networking with top employees and other highly referred candidates offers a much better return on your time investment. Make sure that every time someone like this gives you a name, you have the referrer describe why the person is strong. By making sure you only talk with qualified people, and minimizing time spent talking to unqualified candidates, you can dramatically improve your personal productivity.

Recruiting Ground Rule #2: You must get 99% of all candidates to say "Yes" when you first call.

Even if you pre-qualify everyone before you call them, about 90% of the time the person will still not be a candidate for the current job. (That's 1 in 10 success odds. If the person is not pre-qualified your success rate drops to about 1 in 100.) However, about 50% of the time the person will be well-qualified for some other current or future position, or personally know someone who is qualified for your current position. So this is still a very valuable person, and when you first call, you must make sure that the candidate doesn't say "I'm not interested," too soon. It's best to call the person assuming they could be a potential candidate, rather than the common indirect technique many recruiters use. You'll have more leverage this way if you do it right. That's why the concept of Engage 1st, Network 2nd, is so important to follow.

Your opening pitch is critical to pulling this off.

You need to delay the candidate's yes/no decision by 5-10 minutes to establish your level of professionalism. This gives you the chance to maximize your networking effectiveness.

Here's a pitch we've used with great success in training some top corporate and external recruiters.

Try this out the next time you cold-call a candidate.

"Hi, my name is _______________. I'm a recruiter with ______________. Your name got brought to my attention as someone I should connect with for a senior level search effort in (marketing, etc.) I'm leading. Before I get into any details, let me ask you a very basic

question: If the assignment I'm working on was clearly superior to what you're doing today, would you at least be open to exploring it?"

It's hard to say no to this type of call. 90% of the time the candidate will say yes. Once a candidate says yes, most recruiters then go into sales mode telling the candidate all of the details of the job. Don't do this ever again! Instead, say –

"Great. Let me first obtain a quick two-minute profile of your background, and then I'll give you the two-minute overview of the job. If it makes mutual sense to pursue the job, we'll set up some time to get into a more in-depth discussion."

We'll discuss how to address the reluctant candidate later in this series, but for now assume the person agrees to move forward. If you sound confident and professional, about 90% of the people will follow your direction without hesitating. The key to "engage 1st, network 2nd" is to be vague about the job title (e.g., a senior level position), and get the person to describe their background before the person knows much about the job. Once a candidate says "yes" to the above question, the recruiter is in a stronger position. The candidate now views the recruiter as someone who might have the key to a better job. If the candidate learns about the job details too soon, and is uninterested, the recruiter has lost this leverage.

Since there's only a 10% chance the candidate will be viable for the current job, but a 50% chance they know someone, you want to maximize your chance to network with this person. You do this by peaking their interest in the job, and then obtaining their profile.

This takes at least five minutes. If you come across as a professional, and even if the candidate is not qualified for the current opening, you'll then have a strong chance to network with the person and obtain some great leads.

You'll learn how to obtain some good names in the next session, but for now practice this pitch until it becomes automatic. Reveal as little as possible about your current opening until after you have learned the candidate's qualifications. This way the recruiter makes the decision to go forward, not the candidate.

Being a good recruiter starts by staying in control of the hiring process. This begins the moment you get the pre-qualified candidate on get on the phone.

Unfortunately, for too many recruiters, this is also where it ends.

Next week in the Science of Recruiting, we'll get into the keys to networking. Until then, good luck.

If you like what you've read above, you can learn more in Os2i Certification. You can contact me on tihsur@gmail.com for more details

I hope you would have liked the documentation.

I would appreciate if you can reply with your feedbacks and warm concerns.

Thanking You,

With Best Personal Regards.

Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) - on Boom

2007-10-09T06:56:00.000-07:00

If you are interested in reducing your cost per hire, time to hire and attracting the best talent available, then Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) is definitely worth considering.

WHAT IS RPO?

Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) refers to a company outsourcing its recruitment or staffing process to an external service provider? The external provider shall provide your company with the necessary skills, tools and technologies to perform the recruiting function. Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) will bring in significant COST savings and improvements in the QUALITY of recruitment.

PURPOSE AND BENEFITS

Recruitment Process Outsourcing provides excellent benefits in the areas of Quality, Cost, Service and Speed.

QUALITY: Recruitment is a labor-intensive process and it is further compounded by the fact that it is recurring. To cite an example, your company could have a very high number of open positions during a certain time of the year each requiring varied skill-sets and experience. To hire a team that is capable of sourcing and recruiting these candidates is very challenging. Providers of Recruitment Process Outsourcing have the required processes in place, expertise, an extensive database of resumes and the networking required to source all types of candidates.

COST: Your costs can be significantly reduced because an RPO provider essentially uses economies of scale? They are also capable of handling volume fluctuations in a much easier way. For example, the RPO provider could allocate 10 recruiters to your company when volumes are high and then easily shift them to another client when volumes are low. If you as a company were to hire these 10 recruiters, you would either be forced to pay for resources that are not being used or lay them off which involves overhead expenses.

SERVICE: A Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) provider will help to streamline your companys recruitment function and make it seamless and effective. RPO providers are equipped to provide you with the best people when you need them and also take care of your ongoing and future needs through greater employee retention and process control.

SPEED: Time to hire?is a very critical factor in the recruitment process as this directly affects business performance. A Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) provider will find it much easier to analyze their database and create a pool of candidates that is ready to be interviewed. They need not take time to advertise for the specific job profile.

Recruitment Process Outsourcing is an end-end function. It begins all the way from designing a job profile to charting the recruitment process and also developing orientation strategies once a candidate is hired. It is not just restricted to hiring a specific person for a specific profile at any time. It is about building a talent pool of resources that can be made accessible for your company. RPO providers also go the extra mile to provide your company with valuable advice and strategies on employee retention.

Recruitment Process Outsourcing has a powerful place in the market. RPO providers are well connected to various companies and the job seeker market. They have a much larger and attractive talent pool than any single company could possibly have

The Next Big Thing - Recruitment Process Outsourcing

2007-10-04T04:17:00.000-07:00

Source: Nasscom

In recent times, corporate India has been crying hoarse about the “Talent Crunch” and the “War For Talent” and not without good reasons.

Recruitment Process Outsourcing is in direct response to this rising need in the industry. According to Vipul Prakash, Partner, Elixir web Solutions, an end-to-end RPO company in India, “RPO is a strategic business initiative, which improves a company’s ability in many aspects. It helps to attract, acquire, and deploy talent by bringing specialized expertise, improved focus and proven best practices to the company.” Raghuveer Sakuru, managing Director of Kenexa technologies, one of the earliest players in the RPO space, says, “The RPO segment, although still in its infancy in India, is growing rapidly. The Indian economy is seeing shortages of R&D personnel in the automotive industry, middle and senior management personnel, engineers, MBAs in niche industries such as Biotech and IT product development, and English-speaking employees for retail and call center jobs. A well planned RPO process can go a long way towards filling this void.”

Current scenario in India
Vipul Prakash of Elixir quotes the Gartner estimates of the growth of the global HRO market to $80 billion by 2008. Given the break up of the HRO pie along the different offerings, he estimates that the RPO industry in India today could well be a mammoth INR 2000 crores.

HRO Functions	Percentage Contribution
Payroll	40%

Compensation & Benefits	5%
Performance Management	5%
Training	15%

Enabling the RPO process
RPO firms have responded to the increased demands placed on them with great élan in terms of striving to provide a holistic solution to their clients. According to Asim Handa, Country Leader, Futurestep India, a global RPO firm, “RPO involves conducting a complete due diligence exercise on the client company covering their current processes, hiring practices, vendors they work with etc. this due diligence exercise takes 3-4 weeks. Subsequently, we look at the entire restructuring/remodeling of the company’s processes to make them far more efficient using proprietary software / technology. This process takes another 3-4 weeks. So, the entire process to develop an effective and efficient setup takes around 6-8 weeks, post which the actual business of hiring the right talent starts.

Spectrum of Offering
This has presented unique challenges to the complete that offer RPO solutions. Firstly, they have to battle the popular notion that RPO is synonymous with an executive search process. The realization that RPO is all that and a whole lot more is slowly but surely dawning upon the HR departments of various companies. A look at the typical functions that a RPO firm would provide to its clients is a testimonial to the maturity that the offering is fast achieving.

Spectrum of services provided by RPO firms
»	Staffing department management services
»	On-site staffing professional support
»	Multi-channel sourcing strategy development and execution
»	Employee referral program administration
»	Process consulting & design
»	Direct recruiting services
»	Vendor management for advertising, employment and facilitation
»	Talent management/applicant tracking system
»	Behavioural & trait based pre-employment assessment
»	Skills based pre-employment assessment
»	Employee engagement measurement and retention consulting
»	Full report package & ROI measurement

Key Benefits from an RPO Engagement
Besides the obvious advantage of feeling up time in the HR department and the engagement of a specialist for the job, some of the key benefits that clients of RPO firms have come to see are:

Streamlined Recruitment Process
»	Reduced operational coats of talent acquisition
»	Increased talent levels and consistency
»	Expedited time to market of project teams ensuring timely deployable resources
»	Established process to achieve repeatable results
»	Measurement and tracking of effectiveness of assessment process and quality of hires towards greater accuracy in forecasting
»	Accountable and tracking of effectiveness of assessment process and quality of hires towards greater accuracy in forecasting
»	Create a variable cost structure for the recruitment function

Most vendors claim that they can help their clients achieve 15%-20% returns on their investment in RPO. This would of course be over and above the other significant benefits mentioned above.

The Indian RPO story is just beginning to emerge if global trends are anything to go by. This is the reason that almost all the global majors in this arena like, Futurestep, the RPO subsidiary of Korn/Ferry international, Manpower Inc, Adecco, Kenexa, Talent Fusion, Spherion, Os2i have made a beeline for India.

“Gartner estimates the growth of the global HRO market to $80 billion by 2008”

“Most vendors claim that they can help their clients achieve 15%-20% returns on their investment in RPO”

India: Recruitment Process Outsourcing to witness a big rise

2007-10-04T04:14:00.001-07:00

With the country undoubtedly set to experience a talent shortage of around half million people in the next few years, there is one industry which is all set to cash on the scarcity of manpower. This is the industry which is going to give the crying managers from all verticals a solution so that they can fill manpower target within due time. This newly dawned sector is called-Recruitment Process Outsourcing or RPO. The sector looks promising and with emergence of labor intensive sectors like retailing and IT, the need for competent players (that is RPO) will increase over time.

A conservative estimate by one research firm states that the Indian market is valued not less than $200, 000,000. So, this can very well be measured as the prospective size of the RPO business in the country, which is actually a subset of human resource outsourcing (HRO) market.

It is understood that approximately 80% of the HR personnel are mostly engaged in direct recruitment processes and do not able to do justice to other so called core areas like HR activities which includes training, staffing needs, ensuring performance etc. Here, RPO comes into the picture which takes some of the recruitment headache and thus saves time and cost of companies to large extent.

Recruitment process outsourcing/offshoring rolls

2007-10-04T03:45:00.001-07:00

This new theme on the block is called…. recruitment process outsourcing or RPO. Now, if some one asks what is actually recruitment process outsourcing, you can answer him straight, without much scratching your head. Again it’s a back end work but seems like some brains will be also needed. Read this:

Recruiters have to do a lot of back-end activities like searching for candidates from database and job boards, testing their skills, checking their backgrounds, testing them for drugs, screening their resumes, etc. Companies have now begun to outsource these back-end tasks to third parties — and this process has been grandly christened, like many before it, as Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO). RPO is also known as Employment Process Outsourcing.

The benefits:

1. Reduces the cost of operations
2. Increases the speed of recruitment
3. Frees up HR managers from back-end sourcing tasks.

Thus being saved 60% of the time. From chaffing through ton of resumes from inboxes, finding right profiles from job boards or data banks. So, a RPO, probably based in Bulgaria, Costa Rica or India will free up managers from such mundane tasks.

The worldwide HR market is big. Consider this

The worldwide HR outsourcing market is expected to hit $80 billion by 2008, and RPO, its sub component, will be worth $30 billion, according to Kelly HRfirst, a subsidiary of Kelly Services and one of the largest global RPO players. Another large RPO player is Kenexa.

Recruiters in India Put Out the Call to American Workers

2007-09-28T16:40:00.000-07:00

Because filling temporary, hourly jobs can be a low-margin business, some recruiters have turned to the Indian workforce to handle the work and increase their profits.

By Jeremy Smerd

hennai, India—Sandy Jones left a voice message and a Silicon Valley telephone number for the potential job candidate. Moments later, when a phone rang inside a small office in Chennai, India, Naranjana Iyengar answered it.

"Yes, I did call you regarding a code analyst at Cisco Systems," says Iyengar, who is "Sandy Jones" when calling the U.S. to fill job openings for American employers. "Would contract positions work for you?"

Iyengar, 24, has used an American name since she started working as a telemarketer at a call center several years ago. Today she works for recruitment process outsourcing company Summit HR Worldwide, earning a commission every time she fills a job for her clients in the United States.

Companies looking for talent, from low-level hourly workers to executives, have long relied on headhunters and staffing companies to meet their staffing needs, usually paying them a fee for every position they fill. Now, like most every other industry, recruiting has found its way offshore. Because filling temporary, hourly jobs is a low-margin business, some recruiters, like Summit HR, have turned to the Indian workforce to increase their profits.

Summit HR, founded in 2000 and based in Los Altos, California, has 200 employees and offices in the Indian cities of Chennai, Bangalore and Pune. It recruits both American and Indian workforces, and its client list features Cisco, Intel, Dell, and AT&T as well as staffing companies that want to take on large accounts but find little business value in recruiting for low-level jobs. Recruiters in its two offices in Chennai, an industrial city on the country’s southeastern coast formerly known as Madras, are focused on recruiting American employees.

According to technology consulting firm Gartner, the estimated market size of the recruitment process outsourcing industry worldwide is expected to total $1.4 billion in 2007 and will to grow to $2 billion by 2010.

But despite the world’s embrace of India as a business process outsourcing hub, recruitment outsourcing has not been adopted by companies with equal enthusiasm, says Robert Brown, vice president for research at Gartner. Employers worry that recruiters will not have the necessary skills to competently identify appropriate candidates, he says.

"There’s a real reluctance to heavily embrace the offshore model as it pertains to HR recruitment," Brown says.

At least one staffing company, Spherion Corp., experimented with this outsourcing model. Unhappy with the quality of work it outsourced to Indian recruiters, the company decided to bring that function back onshore, says Brown, who was briefed by Spherion executives on the situation. Spherion declined repeated requests for comment for this story.

Summit COO Sarada Srinivas says companies hesitate to offshore recruiting because it’s a difficult skill to master. With fewer processes that can be standardized, recruiters must have sophisticated language and decision-making skills to sift through thousands of résumés, match a candidate to the right job opening, interview potential employees and send the best ones to onshore recruiters, who then conduct face-to-face interviews.

"What’s really hard to do is separate the wheat from the chaff," Srinivas says of potential candidates. Summit HR executives say their recruiters work at a much higher skill level than most BPOs.

"There’s only so much you can script," Srinivas says of her recruiters’ calls. "The actual interview requires a bit of judgment and what you call the human touch."

Inside Summit’s office in Chennai, 12 young workers, most of them women, sit in front of computers at small cubicles supplied with phones and a map of the United States. Most are recruiting for entry-level and middle-management jobs.

Women compose approximately 35 percent of the IT industry’s workforce in India, according to the Indian IT industry group Nasscom. In its 2005 survey of women in the workplace, women said they feel they have achieved parity with men because they have been in the workforce since the BPO industry began. Women, according to the survey, "are intrinsically suited" to work in the industry because they are good communicators. Women said flexible work hours allowed them to "juggle career aspirations and home."

Recruiters identify themselves by their assumed names, saying they work for a Los Altos, California-based company. Then they leave the company’s Silicon Valley phone number with its 408 area code. Only if people ask do they reveal that the number they’ve dialed connects them to India.

Some recruiters search job boards like Monster. Others sit before Excel spreadsheets plotting their next cold call.

It’s just after midnight in India when Mrudubhashini Chandrashekar, a 24-year-old recruiter, gets Dominique Rodriguez, a construction worker from Redwood City, California, on the line. "Are you looking for any job openings?" Chandrashekar says. "That’s perfect, Dominique. Actually, I got your résumé from Monster and we are tying to fill a position in Stanford Linear Accelerator Center."

Things seem to be going well. Rodriquez is clearly interested in the construction job at the physics research laboratory at Stanford University. Then Rodriquez’s cell phone signal fades. A bit of a panic sets in.

"Hello? Hello? Yes, Dominique, I’m sorry. The voice was breaking up," Chandrashekar says. "Hello? I’m sorry Dominique your woice"—and here she fails to pronounce the "v" in "voice" as she had earlier pronounced it in "valley"—"is breaking up. Would you like me to call back again? Do you have my number? OK. I’ll be waiting for your call."

Correct pronunciation, like an Americanized name, is meant to put the candidate at ease rather than fool them into thinking they’re speaking with an American, recruiters say. Most people are not upset to learn that they’ve received a call from India. Proper accents, though, can establish trust and rapport with candidates, which is what’s needed to keep them on the phone and engaged, recruiters say. Identifying potential hires takes longer than a 60-second call. Perseverance is a quality successful recruiters possess.

"They have to keep it up to see results," says Ausha Anandakumar, who runs Summit’s training and employee development programs. "At the other BPOs you get results right away. You just have to make 350 calls and you get a pat on the back."

Most of the recruiters are hired from the BPO industry, Anandakumar says, where they have experience talking to customers on the phone. Before working at Summit, Iyengar made several hundred calls a day as a telemarketer selling Visa cards. Her target audience was people with low incomes and credit scores.

"We had a lot of strategies to sell those credit cards, saying there was no annual fee and all that," she says.

The job was hard and monotonous, but it exposed Iyengar to the rich vernacular of American profanity.

"They used all the bad words," she says. "We would just say, ‘Thank you for your time.’ " Then she would hang up.

Her current job is an improvement. The hours are similar, usually from 8 p.m. to 5 a.m. Generally, people are happy to hear from a person with job openings.

The company’s training is broken into three parts. First, Indian recruiters learn how to understand job descriptions, where a job is located and how much it pays. Most of the jobs pay an hourly wage.

"That’s a new concept for us. In India we don’t get paid by the hour—we get paid by the month," Anandakumar says. Second, recruiters learn how to find candidates. Using key words, they search online communities like LinkedIn, Craigslist, Yahoo and Google groups, and alumni associations.

Once potential candidates are identified, recruiters inspect the authenticity of the résumé they have submitted and whether a person’s credentials make them good enough to call.

The anatomy of the call goes like this:

First, seek permission.

"Dominique? Is it a good time to talk with you about the position? Perfect." Chandrashekar is back on the phone with her prospective candidate.

Next, interview the candidate. Get them to talk about their experience.

"Can you explain to me a little bit about your position with West Valley Construction?" Chandrashekar asks. "OK. When you said underground construction, what exactly was your position there? What exactly was your role?"

Finally, recruiters must go over the details of the job, its pay rate and whether candidates have any problem with a background check or a drug test. Once a recruiter identifies a potential hire, they give the information to the employer or staffing agency in the U.S., which conducts a face-to-face interview.

But getting to that stage is not easy. Rodriguez turns out to be a good candidate because he’s a construction worker looking for full-time work. One problem quickly arises: Rodriguez’s cell phone signal fades, and with it, the chance—at least for now—to fill a job in California.

"Hello, Dominique? Your voice is breaking up," Chandrashekar says. This time she nails the sound of the "v." But to no avail. The line goes dead. Undeterred, she returns to her list of potential candidates and prepares to make another call.

Sending Job Recruitment Offshore

2007-09-27T05:29:00.000-07:00

TAKEAWAY: In an interesting twist, Indian firms are now assisting job placement firms like Kelly Services and Kenexa with employee recruitment. Working from a candidate profile developed in a U.S. or European office, the Indian firm then matches candidates to the position, conducts phone interviews and sometimes even preliminary salary negotiations before returning a short list of candidates to the placement firm. Like other outsourced processes, the result is lower costs, increased efficiency and reduced turnaround times. Though it attributes unnamed "insiders," this article says that more than half of the recruitment process outsourcing market may be offshored to India within two years.

RPO: The killer app in HR services

2007-09-27T05:25:00.000-07:00

Murali Balasubramanyam focusses on the trend of recruitment process outsourcing.

If there is one problem that is seen as the biggest hurdle to the growth of organisations across the world and across sectors, it is talent scarcity. As part of the HR function, recruiting is the most crucial and time consuming function of any HR department. This leads to a complete transformation in the way the recruitment function is perceived by organisations around the globe. This emanates from the simple logic that when companies across worldwide are trying to focus on their core functions and outsource all non-core functions, why shouldn’t recruitment be outsourced to the experts too? Having said that, it isn’t difficult to understand why Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) as a concept has gained such popularity in a span of a few years. Initially companies expressed reservations, since recruiting the right individual is so crucial to an organisation’s success. Companies soon realised that with talent crunch becoming a perennial problem, its time to bring in the experts. The RPO segment is today the fastest growing global segment for HRO firms. IT companies are among the early adopters of this trend. In fact, the high level of activity seen in this space leads several analysts to believe that the time for multi-million dollar deals in the global RPO space has come.

So what exactly is RPO?

The popularity of the concept has led to several new players entering the market. Some existing HRO players claim to be providers of RPO services by simply re-branding their services. It is of great importance for customers to fully understand the range of services offered by true RPO providers, so as to differentiate them from “RPO-posers”.

As per US-based ERE Media, Recruitment Process Outsourcing is defined as the outsourcing of specific, discrete recruitment processes, performed in both centralised and decentralised applications, involving detailed service level agreements, with the vendor taking complete ownership of the processes of recruitment. Full life-cycle RPO engagements always include a written service-level agreement (SLA) that typically includes a guaranteed minimum number of applicants who meet the hiring managers approved criteria, candidate quality as determined by hiring manager surveys, the speed in which the hired candidates are presented and overall programme cost.

Another criterion that organisations are evaluating is whether the RPO provider is capable of recruiting candidates for its operations, not only in the country of origin but across its offices in various parts of the globe. In other words, they are beginning to differentiate between ‘vanilla’ RPO players and those specialised RPO providers which can partner with them in their global recruitment strategy.

Advantage India

Research firm IDC forecasts staffing and recruitment spending to reach $92 billion globally by 2009 (Source: ERE media study) and RPO services stand a good chance of garnering a large portion of this spending. India, with its huge talent pool and its rich experience in the outsourcing industry, can indeed ride this wave of recruitment process outsourcing. Although the Indian domestic RPO market is still in its nascent stage, global RPO providers are seriously evaluating the option of offshoring their RPO needs to destinations such as India. RPO providers which were early-adopters of an India-based model are now reaping the rewards.

The RPO lifecycle

Companies opt for RPO services based on the range of functions that they consider fit for outsourcing. For example, a client organisation may decide to outsource its entire recruitment/hiring function for all hiring needs, including all skill sets and all job families within the organisation. In this instance, the RPO provider acts as an extension of the organisation’s HR function. This is termed as end-to-end RPO.

In the other type of RPO, a client organisation decides to outsource certain job families and skills to the RPO provider, or it may outsource the expansion of a client’s operations into defined geographies. This is termed as project-based RPO.

The service functions that an RPO player is involved in can be broadly classified into five main categories:

* Consulting: This includes recruitment process design, competitive analysis, job design, market expansion support and technology planning. RPO providers are demonstrating the value-add that RPO can bring to an organisation through their involvement in the planning phase of a client’s human capital needs.

* Sourcing and screening: The candidate sourcing and screening process is very challenging; often, there are limited qualified candidates for open positions, but an abundance of irrelevant resumes. Sourcing and screening includes active and passive headhunting, referral handling, candidate tracking, placement and staffing agency coordination, market intelligence gathering and building recruiter domain knowledge and compiling screening tools. While the hiring decision remains an internal one, RPO providers help to support managers in a variety of ways to speed the hiring process.

* Assessment: This is aimed at gaining valuable insight into candidate personalities and aptitude, prior to making a job offer. It requires specialists trained to conduct psychometric and aptitude testing, comprehension testing, verifying capacity and problem-solving, inspiration and motivation metrics, etc., helping the organisation ensure a glove-fit for the positions.

* Selection: This involves scheduling of interviews, database updating, compliance checking, logistics support, and offer/rejection letter composition. While the hiring decision remains an internal one, RPO providers support managers in a variety of ways to speed the hiring process.

* On-boarding: This involves background checking, drug screening, employee orientation, employee record creation and data porting, and on-site and off-site logistics support. A broadened scope enables buyers to transfer many traditional internal on-boarding activities to RPO providers, further reducing cycle time.

One of the major tenets behind RPO is that there should be the ability to create a significant candidate pool to draw on for their clients. By doing so, the RPO vendor is able to turn around job requisitions more quickly and efficiently than a single employer. At the same time true RPO players need to invest time in follow-up surveys, compiling benchmark data, gauging hiring manager and employee satisfaction post hire and determination of quality of hires. By examining data relating to employee satisfaction, retention rates, and others, RPO providers can improve the recruitment process.

Over the past few years, RPO services have been chiefly employed by IT, retail, finance and insurance and engineering sectors. The trend seems to be gaining ground not only among big organisations but also the small to mid-sized companies. Since RPO affects an organisation’s business growth and success, the organisation should have a detailed understanding of the concept and also of the expenditure for the recruitment process. This helps to identify the processes that should be outsourced, and which RPO is best suited to the unique requirement of the company. Industry studies in the USA show that within two years, 58 percent of the Fortune 2000 companies will rely on this model. This further strengthens the point that RPO is indeed the answer to the recruitment woes of organisations globally.

Among the leading offshore RPO providers is RPOworldwide, a subsidiary of the $270 million IT and BPO provider iGATE Corporation based in the USA. The company is headquartered in Pittsburgh, PA and has its Global Recruitment Centers (GRC) located in Chennai, Bangalore and New Delhi. The company also has its GRCs in Bulgaria and Costa Rica. To date, more than 2,000 professionals have been successfully recruited by the company on behalf of its clients.

BUSINESS PROCESS OUTSOURCING-WHERE DOES RECRUITMENT FIT IN by: Anil Kasibhatla

2007-09-27T05:17:00.000-07:00

Summary:

A new buzzword in the Industry forums these days is Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO). This caters exclusively to the Recruitment subset within a HR function and is slowly but gradually gaining popularity. To counter the problems faced by Global 2000 customers a new process oriented outsourcing model could be used for faster, cheaper, scalable candidate acquisition and retention. Companies like Kellogg’s, Sodexho, Accenture, British Telecommunications, Bank of America are already using this paradigm shift in outsourcing some or all of their process of Recruitment to a third party/outside vendor with measurable and quantifiable results

Body:

BUSINESS PROCESS OUTSOURCING-WHERE DOES RECRUITMENT FIT IT

Companies with farsight, foresight and insight are taking advantage of the advances in Internet technologies, high speed transmission capability, ability to build highly distributed and scaleable architectures to increase overall organizational efficiencies. It’s a no brainer that forward looking companies are trying to maximize their gross margins, profitability, share holder value etc by leveraging a distributed outsourcing model and serve their customers much more effectively. Outsourcing has touched virtually all facets of an organization and includes Human resources as well.

With the information age upon us the “ Human capital” is considered one of the most critical assets and can differentiate winners from losers. One of the most important aspects of any organizations survival and its growth stems from the fact that they retain and recruit the best “Human Capital” out there.

The onus on the Human resources department to provide effective strategies for manpower fulfillment by crafting strategies that are scalable is ever increasing. HR is being asked to partner effectively at the Enterprise level as a strategic resource for the Organization’s growth, and contribute to the top line and the bottom line growth of organizations. Human Resources departments are embracing various strategies including outsourcing recruiting functions.

According to a Staffing.org poll there are only 9 percent of companies that are outsourcing large portions of organizational recruiting, with about 57.6 percent planning to increase the large-scale outsourced recruiting.

According to Gartner by 2004, HR BPO revenue is forecast to reach 51 billion dollars, representing 39 per cent of all BPO revenue.

Emergence of deals in the industry (HR BPO)

Bofa-Exult

Mckesson-Exult

Nortel-PwC

CIBC-EDS

Gateway-ACS

Sodexho-Spherion

Kellogg’s-RES

So what is Recruitment Process Outsourcing and how can organizations plug in the RPO and create a successful global distributed model?

Recruitment Process Outsourcing or (RPO) can be defined as outsourcing all the transactional process driven initiatives that go into recruiting talent for any given organization. For the purposes of this article we will study some of the transactions within RPO that could be sent offshore and use the global distributed model of labor cost arbitrage.

Some of the functions broadly used in recruiting talent at various levels in an organization are the following:

1) Job creation/Strategy development

2) Sourcing/competitive intelligence building (direct vs. indirect channels)

3) Print/media/Job Board Posting/Mining

4) Screening (reactive vs. proactive)

5) Applicant tracking/candidate database upkeep, recruitment portal management

6) Applicant Interviews, Interview Logistics

7) Selection

8) Closing the candidate

9) Offer generation, offer extension

10) Reference checking, background investigation, drug testing

11) Start date co-ordination, orientation etc

As always there are certain processes within RPO that can be best off-shored to yield optimum results.

JOB CREATION/ STRATEGY DEVELOPMENT (ON-SITE FUNCTION): This is largely a strategic initiative for any organization and for all practical purposes makes absolute sense to keep it in-house/on-site.

2) SOURCING/COMPETITIVE INTELLIGENCE BUILDING (OFF-SHORE FUNCTION): By far one of the most important aspects of the recruitment process, and for the sake of making the recruitment process outsourcing a success it makes sense to outsource this function to a third party vendor. Recruiting vendors/Search companies have historically mastered the art of sourcing and can bring to the table their expertise in sourcing qualified candidates (active and passive) through direct and indirect channels.

The technological breakthroughs of Web crawlers, Meta data engines, x-raying, flipping, googling etc allow the sourcing sub function to be off-shored. Dedicated research teams can be trained to use these techniques to source Human capital talent from various industry sources out on the web. This is particularly of significance since this could be a good source of passive candidates that can be constantly added to the pipeline of prospective candidates. In addition sourcing teams can be used to fetch candidates (active) from job boards as well.

BENEFITS: Since sourcing takes away between 20% to 30% of a recruiters time off- shoring this function will allow recruiters to spend their time in better due diligence of sourced candidates and in building a meaningful relationship with prospective candidates or future hires. This way the quality of hires coming through would be much higher thus helping the organization eventually.

3) PRINT/MEDIA/JOB BOARD POSTING/MINING (OFF-SHORE FUNCTION): However good or bad the economic cycles are it’s safe to outsource the posting, mining of job boards to outside vendors. This again makes sense since most recruiting folks in companies can use their functional expertise in a much more strategic area rather than spend time posting jobs and mining job boards for candidates.

BENEFITS: Typically this amounts to between 5% and 10% of a recruiter’s time. In a down economy especially recruiters could be overwhelmed with applicant responses. Allowing this function to stay offshore helps recruiters focus on quality candidates and weed through the pile of unqualified resumes.

4) SCREENING (ON-SITE AND OFF-SHORE): Screening just as sourcing is a very important aspect of the recruitment process and pretty much defines the quality of the candidates coming through. It’s imperative that organizations invest sufficient time in defining the “attributes” both tangible and intangible they seek in candidates thoroughly to the recruiting vendor thus helping in bringing quality talent through the door. Once the pool of candidates is sourced the off-shore team can be used for the first set of screening. This could be template driven screening to include checks for geography, relocation, salary, amount of travel, sponsorship/visa issues, core tech strengths etc.

BENEFITS: Pre-screening is a major chore and once off-shored can help recruiters in focusing on understanding the candidates core/ancillary strengths, conducting behavioral screening, profile generation, articulating the job description, selling the opportunity etc. The major benefit of off-shoring this function would be lesser time to hire and better quality of candidates.

5) APPLICANT TRACKING/CANDIDATE DATABASE UPKEEP, RECRUITMENT PORTAL MANAGEMENT (ON-SITE AND OFF-SHORE FUNCTION): Depending on the amount of dollars already invested in ATS systems, recruitment portals, databases (ERP systems etc) careful analysis has to be done in outsourcing this function. If the recruiting vendor has expertise in supporting and upgrading the systems as per the needs of the organization it makes sense in outsourcing this function as well.

BENEFITS: The ATS function is a key process driven function and will help companies analyze the candidate in-flow, quality, workflow, mining for information etc. Redundant, repeatable steps within the ATS could be off-shored helping recruiters use their valuable time in “slicing and dicing” the core database functionalities for hidden gems.

6) APPLICANT INTERVIEWS, INTERVIEW LOGISTICS (ON-SITE FUNCTION): Applicant interviews or candidate interviews, are functions that have to be maintained in house and the only aspect of this transaction that can be outsourced is the logistics piece.

Steps 7, 8, 9 and 11 are to be maintained in-house, and step 9 can be outsourced to a recruiting vendor as well.

In conclusion it’s safe to assume that Recruitment Process Outsourcing can be effectively ported through a Global distributed model by retaining certain strategic key functions on-site and off-shoring repeatable, transactional driven functions.

BIO:

Anil Kasibhatla is a Principal with Paul Tittle Search group in McLean, VA. He has a Masters in MIS and brings over a decade of experience in Business systems/ Information systems analysis and has spent the last 6 years in recruiting a wide variety of Human Capital talent in Technology, Sales and Business development. He currently focuses on Enterprise Recruiting Strategies for early, later stage companies and has successfully completed Searches at the strategic, tactical and individual contributor levels. He can be reached at anil@paul-tittle.com

RPO: India's latest outsourcing mantra

2007-09-27T05:13:00.000-07:00

After the business process outsourcing and knowledge process outsourcing boom, the corporate sector in India is steadily gearing up for a new concept - RPO, that is recruitment process outsourcing. It aims at taking the burden out of the head-hunting business of the corporate sector.

"There has been a sudden surge of demand for candidates as the job scenario in the country looks in a good shape. So, we have come up with our team of recruiters to bridge this gap between demand and supply," says Vipul Prakash, partner of a firm handling recruitments.

While the RPO concept has taken a healthy shape in the Western countries, in India however, there are only a few RPO firms currently catering to the needs of various domestic as well as multi-nationals in hiring employees for them.

The milch cow for Indian KPOs

"The RPO sector in India is currently at its infant stage. Our clients need higher quality with increased efficiency. For that reason, forecasting must be done in the market," says Harish Bhattiprolu, director of a Hyderabad-based company.

Headquartered in the US with 1600 clients worldwide, the firm has been operating in India since the last one-and-half-years, having a client base of 16 companies in the country.

"We have developed a multi-channel sourcing strategy along with structured interview tools to tap the right kind of applicants for various positions. Most importantly, we share the risks involved in hiring a candidate with our clients," Harish says.

IT, finance, banking, pharmacy, life sciences, retailing are some of the areas these companies are currently providing their services to.

"As these are the sectors where there is a sudden surge of demand for candidates, we are catering to their needs," says Harish of Kenexa Technology.

"In the changing job scenario, no employee sticks in an organisation for more than two years. That is the reason why companies spend a lot of money and time in hiring the required human resource. There comes the need for RPO firms which act as the specialised consulting firm for recruitments," says Vipul Prakash of Elixier Web Solutions.

Currently operating in Delhi and Pune, Elixier has marketing offices in the US, UK, Canada and Australia.

"Corporates aspiring to build large talent pools within a short period of time are at a loss when it comes to assessing and selecting resumes. Kenexa gives the companies the bandwidth to select the right talent from the resume pool," says Harish.

An RPO firm directly goes to the employers with the right kind of professionals, starting from a fresher to filling up the position of a well-experienced director.

"Many international companies are opening up their offices in the country and looking for professionals to handle their operations. We serve their needs by providing them with the right talent," Vipul says.

Keeping in view the booming job scenario, Elixier is planning to open up its offices in China, Eastern Europe and Brazil soon.

The firm receives around 5,000 CVs every day. With the aid of an expert team of recruiters, it selects the suitable candidates, keeping in mind the client's specific requirements.

"Right now our focus is on the Indian market, and very much metro specific. But we are planning to go to smaller towns in the near future," Vipul says.

With the employment scenario taking a healthy turn in India, hiring of RPO firms by companies for their recruitment solutions would certainly play a vital role in near future. And this would then ease the burden on the HR operations of a company.

RPO is the new buzz in BPOs

2007-09-27T05:11:00.000-07:00

NEW DELHI: After the BPO and KPO boom, the corporate sector in India is steadily gearing up for a new concept - RPO, that is Recruitment Process Outsourcing. It aims at taking the burden out of the head-hunting business of the corporate sector.

"There has been a sudden surge of demand for candidates as the job scenario in the country looks in a good shape. So, we have come up with our team of recruiters to bridge this gap between demand and supply", says Vipul Prakash, Partner of a firm handling recruitments.

While the RPO concept has taken a healthy shape in the Western countries, in India however, there are a few RPO firms currently catering to the needs of various domestic as well as multi-nationals in hiring employees for them.

"The RPO sector in India is currently at its infant stage. Our clients need higher quality with increased efficiency. For that reason, forecasting must be done in the market", says Harish Bhattiprolu, Director of a Hyderabad- based company.

Headquartered in US with 1600 clients worldwide, the firm has been operating in India since the last one-and-half- years, having a client base of 16 companies in the country.

"We have developed a multi-channel sourcing strategy along with structured interview tools to tap the right kind of applicants for various positions. Most importantly, we share the risks involved in hiring a candidate with our clients", Harish says.

IT, Finance, Banking, Pharmacy, Life Sciences, Retailing are some of the areas these companies are currently providing their services. "As these are the sectors where there is a sudden surge of demand for candidates, we are catering to their needs", says Harish of Kenexa Technology.

"In the changing job scenario, no employee sticks in an organisation for more than two years. That is the reason why companies spend a lot of money and time in hiring the required human resource. There comes the need for RPO firms which act as the specialised consulting firm for recruitments", says Vipul Prakash of Elixier Web Solutions.

Currently operating in Delhi and Pune, Elixier has marketing offices in US, UK, Canada and Australia.

"Corporates aspiring to build large talent pools within a short period of time are at a loss when it comes to assesing and selecting resumes. Kenexa gives the companies the bandwidth to select the right talent from the resume pool", says Harish.

An RPO firm directly goes to the employers with the right kind of professionals, starting from a fresher to filling up the position of a well-experienced director.

"Many international companies are opening up their offcies in the country and looking for professionals to handle their operations. We serve their needs by providing them with the right talent", Vipul says.

Keeping in view the booming job scenario, Elixier is planning to open up its offices in China, Eastern Europe and Brazil soon.

The firm receives around 5,000 CVs every day. With the aid of an expert team of recruiters, it selects the suitable candidates, keeping in mind the client's specific requirements. "Right now our focus is on the Indian market, and very much metro specific. But we are planning to go to smaller towns in near future", Vipul says.

With the employment scenario taking a healthy turn in India, hiring of RPO firms by companies for their recruitment solutions would certainly play a vital role in near future. And this would then ease the burden on the HR operations of a company.

Quick exit for backdoor jobs

2007-09-27T05:09:00.000-07:00

Stringent background checks on employees have come to redefine the hire and fire policy of most corporate companies.

It was nothing short of facing the firing squad for hundreds of employees from two big companies who were fired recently.

While most were labelled 'non-performers', a few failed on the employee verification check that their "fake'documents were put through. Could there have been a harder way to learn that fraudulence can't go scot-free?

"Certainly not,'responds Jagat Jyoti Mohanty, HR manager with Airtel, adding, "Integrity cannot be compromised. If an employee's resume has any discrepancies, he will be relieved of his/her responsibilities. Mohanty's company will "soon outsource the background check operations to an agency".

Several companies are hiring detective firms to run checks on potential and current employees. Explains Ashish Mathur of Trident Investigation Network, a Delhi-based detective agency, "Most companies get done a background check of potential recruits.

In cases where a large volume of talent intake is needed, the process of verification continues even after recruitment. A candidate's educational qualifications, previous employment record and health record are usually checked.

It's a basic check, and doesn't take much time. Further investigations involve checking on police records, family and lifestyle details etc for high level employees, which could take anywhere from a week to 30 days.

Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) is growing as an industry in itself. "Though in its nascent stages, it is worth close to Rs 600 crores, considering the high employment and attrition rates,'informs Ajay Trehan, CEO, Auth Bridge, an investigation agency. They perform well over 3,000 background checks every month and on an average, 30 per cent resumes are found fake. Over the last two to three years, the RPO sector has grown by 30 per cent, according to industry sources. The reasons for the growth are many.

Companies think of RPO as a beneficial investment for long-term returns. Says Mukund Menon, vice president, Satyam Global HR, "It has helped build talent with the right qualifications and experience. Since we operate in various overseas locations, it is critical that all our associates be compliant with the global standards that we adhere to.'

Companies dealing with financial transactions and sensitive data have become extra cautious about background checks. Topping the list are BPOs, IT companies and banks. But other industries like real estate, pharmaceutical and FMCGs that have traditionally not used RPO services are also investing in it. Typically, information pertaining to top and middle level employees come under the scanner the most. "On an average, companies spend four to seven per cent of a potential employee's offered package on his/her background check,'informs Trehan. Several companies that have a small employee base conduct their own background checks rather than investing in outsourced services. Says an employee of a corporate bank, "We rely the most on a candidate's previous employer's feedback and reference letters.'

But a lot of fraudulence occurs in details regarding past employment, where experience and reference letters are faked. "Reference letters and salary slips can be manipulated. If a company is offering a package you can't resist, you are tempted enough to change a few facts here and there,'shares Giridhar Kumar (name changed), BPO employee.

MNCs poach, Indian companies feel the heat

2007-09-27T05:03:00.000-07:00

NEW DELHI: The Indian IT sector is facing the heat. And giving them a run for their money are top MNCs who are on a recruitment spree, leading to attrition problems among Indian companies.

The pressure is on two fronts — skilled manpower and pricing. IBM, for example, opened its fifth global delivery centre in India in June, while Accenture hired 1,600 employees in May. In fact, Accenture’s Indian employee base now accounts for over 10% of its global workforce.

Over the next three years, the company plans to add 30,000-50,000 people in India, China and Philippines, says William D Green, CEO.

Holding on to skilled manpower is therefore an uphill task for Indian players, say experts. "Most have been steadily losing employees. Infosys lost nearly 1,400 employees in the quarter ending June," says an industry expert. And with MNCs becoming more aggressive about their India plans, the problem will aggravate. But most Indian firms are in denial mode.

Harjeet Aulakh, Alps Management Consultant, says: "Many Indian companies may not be giving the exact picture due to stock market compulsions."

Wipro and Infosys, while announcing their first quarter results recently, said that despite heavy hiring by MNCs and Indian IT providers, attrition rates had actually "gone down".

MNCs are able to attract the best talent, says Pradeep Udhas, ED, KPMG, because of better pay packets and global working conditions. Nasscom’s Sunil Mehta however says the situation may not be that bad.

"Look at it this way — both are trying to climb the same mountain from different directions. The good thing is, it’s creating more jobs in India."

This has led to salary hikes here and increased expenditure on recruitment and training. A study by NeoIT found that IT salaries in India experienced the most significant growth compared to other offshore/near shore destinations in 2004. The trend is expected to be repeated in 2005. "The shuffling has resulted in talented manpower being recruited by both the MNCs and Indian majors. This may not have been the case earlier," says Roopesh Shah, MaFoi, a global HR consulting firm.

Vietnam: The next BPO hotspot?

2007-09-27T05:01:00.000-07:00

HANOI: Vietnam would soon take over China and India as a more popular outsourcing destination, an online article said.

The tip was made on July 10 by Harvey Nash, a British recruitment company that recently acquired Ho Chi Minh-based recruitment business SilkRoad for $1.8 million.

The recruitment company said Vietnam has the second-highest gross domestic product growth after China and the country is now the third-largest offshore-services destination in Southeast Asia.

The emerging position of Vietnam as a new outsourcing hub was firmed up by a fast-growing information technology work force.

The country's labour pool has about 80,000 IT graduates with some 9,000 more graduates added every year.

More than half of Vietnam's 84 million population is under 25 years old and the number of science-majoring students account for 83 percent of the total number of graduates.

"With a growing and youthful IT workforce, low costs and high aspirations to develop its software services, Vietnam is a natural offshore location and has all the ingredients to become the leading market choice in the next few years," said SilkRoad CEO Marc Voss said.

Companies already outsourcing IT services to Vietnam include Honda Motor and Intel, the world leading chip producer that has just invested $1 billion in a chip factory in southern Vietnam.

News Letter I received On Recruitment And Earning

2007-09-26T09:51:00.000-07:00

Question: Who are the highest paid professionals?
Answer: Entertainers and athletes.

Question: Why is that?
Answer: Because they have the discipline to practice harder and longer than anyone else in any other profession.

Tiger Woods practiced since he was 3, going so far as to redo his swing--not once--but twice! Michael Jordan was notorious for the number of free-throws he practiced. Johnny Depp spent years perfecting his humor and studying masters, such as Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin.

Question: In the corporate world, who has the potential to make the most money?
Answer: Sales people.

And yet, sales professionals often say they can go into a client meeting without a prepared script or game-plan. They justify it by saying, "It's more natural if I just wing it." Can you imagine Tiger Woods saying that? Not a chance! The sales professionals that have the most success have the most discipline.

If you are in sales, and everyone is in sales (See February's Bright Ideas), then you need to harness your discipline to become the best. Here are 6 things, if done with discipline, that will immediately improve your performance.

Exercise. You may think this has nothing to do with selling, but in reality it has everything to do with it. Exercise gives you focus, creates endorphins to make you more happy and creative, keeps you in good health so you can put in more hours (and better focus) than the competition, and gives you more vitality. The hour before work running or doing Yoga will give you an edge that will carry over into your work and help you win on the hard days. As Tom Fleming's Boston Marathon training sign read, "Somewhere in the world someone is training when you are not. When you race him, he will win." Keep physically fit and mentally tough so you are the one who wins.
Study. Improve your skills all the time. Have the discipline to spend one hour a day reading. Audio CDs and MP3s (to listen to when your working-out) count. If you're not continuously learning, then you stagnate and fall behind. If you are a sales professional, read about selling techniques and systems, time management, marketing, communications, memory power, public speaking, fashion, presentation skills and motivation. And that is just for starters. Biography should also be at the top of your list. Newspapers should not. If you want a reading list send me an email at dksweet@lightbulbtraining.com.
Take action. There are so many people who have an idea, read a book, or go to a seminar, then make a plan but fail to take action on that plan. An idea without action is mental masturbation. Find a way to put your ideas into action. Otherwise, your learning time was a waste of time.
Time management. Time management is a misnomer for self-management and self-discipline. You must manage yourself within time, planning what you do and when you do it. If you put it on your calendar, then do it. Get rid of your "To Do" lists and have only "Will Do" lists. This one item alone can make a huge impact in your work.
Make 10 calls first thing in the morning. Phone calling in the morning, when the rest of the world is passively checking their email, gives you the acceleration and momentum to create a dynamic day.
Create messages. Do you know what you will say when you walk into a client's office? You should have it memorized and down pat. What about rebuttals to a prospect's objections? Or what about a series of questions that helps to make prospects think and buy your product? Do you have a memorized 30-second elevator pitch? You must spend time creating your messages. Then memorize your lines. Athletes have game plans, actors memorize their lines, and you need to have the discipline to create, memorize, and practice your messaging.

Hiring: The next big wave in BPOs

2007-09-24T14:54:00.001-07:00

High attrition rates may be a blot on the great Indian BPO success story, but this problem has helped spin off a niche industry - Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO)- which is expected to grow by a billion dollar this fiscal to about $3.5 billion.

The industry is set for rapid growth with a large number of companies in India and from abroad seeking to outsource their hiring-related jobs to third-party vendors here in order to save costs as well as time.

"India has been a hub of global outsourcing activities and RPO is the sunrise segment in this sector," hiring industry umbrella body Executive Recruiters Association's Executive Director B R Muralidharan told media.

"In India, RPO is already a $2.5 billion market and is expected to grow at a rate of 30 to 40 per cent during this financial year," he said.

This new buzzword is already enjoying taste of success with a number of corporate giants adopting the RPO model for their hiring needs inside and outside India. The hiring needs of British mobile major Vodafone is taken care of by RPO provider Alexander Mann Solutions, which also handled accounts of clients like Credit Suisse, HP, Prudential and Capgemini.

Closer home in India, the BPO arm of the country's third largest IT firm Wipro has outsourced its recruitment process to MeritTrac and aims to reduce its hiring costs by 15-20 per cent by this move.

"Right hiring is the first and the most important step toward reducing attrition. Our objective is to move to a 'hands-free' recruiting process and this is the first step towards it," Wipro BPO CEO T K Kurien said.

Kanika Vaswani, Associate Partner at city-based RPO service provider Elixir Web Solutions said: "RPOs have been a well accepted tool especially in the mature markets. This allows an HR manager to focus on other core functions.

Elixir started its RPO business about six years back, catering mostly to the information technology clients. However, the market has expanded considerably and now its clients come from across the sectors, Vaswani said.

"We are now hiring in hundreds for many Fortune 1000 companies across sectors and 80 per cent of all the hirings we are doing are for US-based companies and the remaining 20 per cent are for companies from Europe, Australia and Canada," she added.

Another Indian RPO service provider Blue Square Consultancy Services' CEO Madhu Khanna said India has managed to get a leverage in the business with its rich outsourcing experience.

"The future of RPO sector is bright with a chunk of the US workforce retiring in the next 5 to 10 years, thus creating a severe problem of talent acquisition.

"At present, the US-based recruiting and staffing agencies outsource their back-end operations to India on a revenue sharing basis and will continue to do so, but a significant difference would be seen going forward with a large number of vacancies coming on board," Khanna added.

Besides saving costs and reducing cycle time, RPOs also help companies improve quality of hiring, the industry players believe. While companies had reservations initially about outsourcing their recruitment process - one of the most important human resource practice in an organisation - rising attrition rates and expanding sphere of overall HR functions have made them accept and welcome borrowed hands to handle the hiring process.

After BPOs, it's now the turn of RPOs

2007-09-24T14:52:00.000-07:00

With over 22% growth in the job market across industries, India, Inc. will be eyeing executive and specialized talent from overseas.

The employment boom in India is creating a talent shortage. In this changing scenario, a new concept has emerged -- Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO). The concept aims at taking the burden out of the headhunting business of the corporate sector.

India, Inc. requires R&D talent in the automotive industry, middle and senior level managers, engineers, MBAs, workers in niche industries (such as biotech and IT product development), and English-speaking employees for retail and call center jobs.

In many organisations, recruiters spend a majority of their time sorting through resumes in their inbox or finding candidates from job boards - over 60 per cent of their time is spent in these areas. 'Outsourcing their non-core functions helps save time and increase productivity levels,' says M K Khanna, owner of Blue Square, an offshore service provider currently catering to the US market.

Factors driving RPO growth in India include exponential growth in recruitment and employment activity, perceived shortage of talent, changing attitudes at workplace and need to achieve cost savings, efficiencies and recruiting expertise.

An RPO firm, a fast emerging subset of human resource outsourcing (HRO), directly goes to the employers with the right kind of professionals, starting from a fresher to filling up the position of a well-experienced director.

Based on market research, international geographies that are most likely to benefit from this growth are UK (most active RPO market in Europe) with Germany, India, Malaysia and Russia as the fastest emerging markets for RPO, says Sonal Chandole, national sales director, Kelly Services India. The company has a specialized business unit, Kelly HRfirst, which focuses on providing RPO programs for clients worldwide.

The HR Outsourcing worldwide market is estimated by Gartner to touch $ 75-80 billion by 2008. A Nasscom-McKinsey report has projected that Indian firms' revenues from HRO will increase to $3.5 billion by 2008. Gartner also thinks India can expect to win 10-15 per cent of the US HRO services market. Considering, only 6 per cent of US HR spend is presently off shored, there is a lot of potential in the market.

But the question arises that to what extent is off shoring really possible? "Strategic RPO works more on a hybrid model where offshore components are complimented with onsite presence which can be short-term for information exchange or long-term for logistics facilitation", tells Kamal Karanth, CEO, Ma Foi, Malaysia. With the advent of new-age technology options it is imminently possible to provide a full-spectrum administrative RPO from a totally different geography, he adds.

But, India's needs are tempered by distrust born from inconsistent pricing and substandard deliverables from past vendors, warns Chandole. The concern over maintaining confidentiality of data and corporate security also is a central issue for companies planning to offshore the services.

The most frequently outsourced HR functions today are "low-end" transactional duties like payroll, benefits administration, and education.

Few multi-national firms are consolidating their recruitment process by handling the HR functions from a particular base. Keane is currently handling its recruitment processes from India. "We have small groups of experienced HR personnel in our branches worldwide. These people co-ordinate with our HR department in India giving their specific requirements," says Sukant Srivastava, managing director, Keane's India Operations.

Critics fear that employees in foreign countries may not be able to effectively screen through and route resumes. "The HR personnel's in every country are required to fill an resource requisition form which gives detailed information about requirements of the job and the needed experience and qualification of the candidates to be reviewed," informs Srivastava.

But, although hard skill assessment of resumes can be undertaken offshore where the profiles are fairly standardized, soft skill assessment which is an important part of an RPO solution can only be done by experts and in countries where the resources are required to be deployed, admits Chandole.

Graduates with the right attitude and aptitude to learn a new process can make a good shot at an entry level position in this industry. People with HR and resource management background have a good career scope in this field. While salaries differ depending on the location of RPO Hub, an individual at the entry level can expect to earn between Rs 1.5-2 lakh annually.

Given the right skills and attitude, a person dedicated to this field for over 5 years could earn up to Rs 12 lakhs per year, adds the national sales director, Kelly Services, India.

The RPO sector in India is currently at its infant stage. Western expertise combined with Asian diligence, computer literacy, commitment to results and cost effectiveness can lead to a major boom in this segment. The RPO market in India is expected to touch about $30 billion in the next two years. Are we ready to cash in on this opportunity?

Recruitment outsourcing to grow by 35% in India

2007-09-24T14:50:00.000-07:00

NEW DELHI: With the country set to face a talent crunch of half million people in the next few years, Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) is posing a lot of opportunities . With emerging sectors like retailing and IT, the need for focused players in recruiting as RPO service providers will increase , according to human capital management company Kenexa Technologies.

âThere is an intense war for talent. The hiring projections for India are very rosy and the clients are demanding higher quality candidates with increased efficiency . I feel, RPO as an industry will grow 30 to 35 per cent annually for the next 5 years,â Kenexa Technologies Director Tarun Singh told Mumbai Mirror.

It is estimated that within the Indian market, the total annual spend on recruitment is Rs 700-800 crore. This can theoretically be considered the potential size of the RPO business, a subset of human resource outsourcing (HRO), that can be generated from locally-based companies .

âHiring pressure is forcing companies outsource the entire recruitment cycle from needs assessment to sourcing, screening, and interviewing candidates, and hiring.

In fact, 80 per cent of HR personnel are engaged in recruitment process and in between they fail to focus on other core HR activities, including training, staffing needs, ensuring performance. Here enters RPO that takes care of the entire recruitment headache and saves time and cost of companies too.â Kelly Services India Country General Manager Achal Khanna pointed out.

A Nasscom-McKinsey report has projected that the Indian firmsâ revenues from HRO will increase to $3.5 billion by 2008, while Gartner thinks India can expect to win 10-15 per cent of the US HRO services market; and finally, only 6 per cent of US HR spend is offshored, a figure that is certain to rise.

Talking to this newspaper, talent management firm SITI Corporation President and CEO Veena Gundavelli said, âWe have serviced about 100 RPO clients in SITI in the last couple of years and we expect to double the customer base with some long term-contracts . The types of customers that we have can broadly be classified into four verticals - IT, engineering , healthcare and financial services industry.â

Gundavelli explained that RPO is primarily being embraced in two models â model one is pure sourcing and providing support services to on-shore US based recruiters to enhance their productivity and effectiveness, model two is full cycle recruiting from sourcing, screening and onboarding for both temporary contract as well as permanent positions to reduce overall cost of recruiting operations and to improve efficiency at the same time

Google News - RPO is BPO's new billion-dollar-baby

2007-09-24T14:41:00.000-07:00

Source - PTI

“India has been a hub of global outsourcing activities and RPO is the sunrise segment in this sector,” hiring industry umbrella body Executive Recruiters Association’s Executive Director B R Muralidharan said. “In India, RPO is already a $2.5 billion market and is expected to grow at a rate of 30 to 40 per cent during this financial year,” he said.

This new buzzword is already enjoying taste of success with a number of corporate giants adopting the RPO model for their hiring needs inside and outside India. The hiring needs of British mobile major Vodafone is taken care of by RPO provider Alexander Mann Solutions, which also handled accounts of clients like Credit Suisse, HP, Prudential and Capgemini.

Closer home in India, the BPO arm of the country’s third largest IT firm Wipro has outsourced its recruitment process to MeritTrac and aims to reduce its hiring costs by 15-20 per cent by this move. “Right hiring is the first and most important step toward reducing attrition, with our objective being for a ‘hands-free’ recruiting process,” Wipro BPO CEO T K Kurien said.

Kanika Vaswani, Associate Partner at city-based RPO service provider Elixir Web Solutions said: “RPOs have been accepted in the mature markets. This allows an HR manager to focus on other core functions.” Elixir started its RPO business about six years back, catering mostly to the IT clients. However, the market has expanded considerably and now its clients come from across the sectors, Ms Vaswani said.

“We are now hiring in hundreds for many Fortune 1000 companies across sectors and 80 per cent of all the hirings we are doing are for US-based companies and the remaining 20 per cent are for companies from Europe, Australia and Canada,” she added.

Another Indian RPO service provider Blue Square Consultancy Services’ CEO Madhu Khanna said India has managed to get a leverage in the business with its rich outsourcing experience. “The future of RPO sector is bright with a chunk of the US workforce retiring in the next 5 to 10 years.”

Hiring process

“At present, the US-based recruiting and staffing agencies outsource their back-end operations to India on a revenue sharing basis and will continue to do so, but the difference would be seen with a large number of vacancies coming on board,” Khanna added.

Besides saving costs and reducing cycle time, RPOs also help companies improve quality of hiring, industry players believe. While companies had reservations initially about outsourcing their recruitment process, rising attrition rates and expanding sphere of overall HR functions have made them accept and welcome borrowed hands to handle the hiring process.

All that a firm seeking to outsource its hiring functions needs to do is to provide an RPO with the details of job openings and the salary range in the offering.

From here the RPO takes over, advertising for the position, screening resumes, shortlisting candidates and finally going to the employers with the right professionals. The openings can range from a fresher to a very senior employee of a company.

Outsourcing service providers are now increasing in number to become niche firms focused on HR outsourcing business. Recruitment process outsourcing has also come as a new lease of life for smaller companies with a workforce of around 100 to 150 people, who may not have a HR department, Vaswani said.

Companies involved

Initially, the RPO business was limited to the IT sector and only recently non-IT companies have begun outsourcing their HR functions, domestic IT and outsourcing firm Birlasoft’s global HR Vice President Narendra Puppala said.

However, the industry players are not worried about the BPO sector’s current nemesis in form of high attrition rates denting the growth story. This sector will not feel the heat of attrition so much as the BPOs as in this process they get the satisfaction of using their minds as well, Mr Puppala said.

Benefits of offshore Recruitment Process Outsourcing (oRPO)

2007-08-27T07:42:00.001-07:00

Benefits of offshore Recruitment Process Outsourcing (oRPO)

Outsourcing select recruitment processes to OS2i will make a significant impact on your bottom line while measurably increasing your recruiting effectiveness.

Compared to the total cost of employing an onshore recruiter, sourcer or administrator, you save between 50% to 75%
Your recruiting capabilities increase without increasing your headcount
Speed of hire and candidate yield improve through 24x7 resourcing support
Quality of hire improves as your internal recruiting staff has more time to spend with quality candidates
OS2i’s expert Internet searching skills and recruitment tools find candidates you might not

If you are interested in finding out more

Rushit Shah

tihsur@gmail.com
0+91 9371076634